


Easy Things to Lose

by unos



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Cats, Comfort, Cuddling & Snuggling, Gen, Loneliness, M/M, Magic, Pre-Relationship, Skin Hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-03-25 19:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13841334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unos/pseuds/unos
Summary: “I wonder where he is?” he asks out loud. The cat looks at him. Sometimes Yuzu feels like it is implicitly calling him an idiot, wondering at how Yuzu can be so dumb. He doesn’t know. He just scratches the cat under its chin until its eyes close and it begins purring again. They cuddle for a while, cat on Yuzu’s chest and Yuzu on the bed, falling asleep due to the soothing purring and warmth of the cat. “I really do wonder,” Yuzu murmurs, “it’s weird he’s not around.”The cat purrs louder. “I kind of miss him,” he tells it, “you know? I’ve barely been around, and we have so little time together, it’s nice to hang out when we can. So when he does stuff like this, just disappearing, and not coming to practice or sleeping through dinner plans, that sucks.”...alternative title: Cat!fic





	1. kitty cat, kitty cat, are you out of bed?

**Author's Note:**

> I've been stuck on three other projects and also the painful rut of my bad mental health, and this idea made me feel better.  
> Painfully unbeta-ed, sorry about that. I hope you enjoy it anyway <3

 

The first thing Yuzu sees is Keiji, frowning in the warm-up area before practice, looking around as if searching for something very specific.

“Have you seen Shoma?”

Yuzuru has, in fact, not seen Shoma since the last time they were at practice, 16 hours earlier. These practice times are killing him. They are probably killing Shoma more.

“Nope. I’m sure he’s skipping to sleep, you know how he gets.”

Keiji shrugs, but it doesn’t stop him from looking around and frowning some more. He continues doing it while he stretches and jogs around. Yuzuru, bending at the waist to touch the ground with both palms, commends his dedication.

The second thing Yuzu sees, is a black blur, followed by Evgenia. Evgenia is followed by Alina. Both of them are making high-pitched noises at each other while running after the first thing.

The blur is coming closer, manifesting as some kind of animal. That’s weird. There’s no animals allowed at the rink; this is an animal free zone.

The blurry creature takes a sharp left at the doorway and rushes in their direction. Yuzu follows it with his eyes as he continues to warm up, jumping in place. Evgenia and Alina follow it with their entire bodies, and their squeals. They are cute, but also terrifying. Yuzu knows exactly how the little animal must feel.

He sighs, watches it chase along the wall. He’s been in that spot. He does not envy the... It’s a cat, he decides, when the little thing has been cornered and the girls are crowding around him enough for it to stop being blurry. A tiny cat. Fluffy, too. Yuzu kind of wants to join the girls and pet it, but he doesn’t want to add to its distress.

Keiji, now on his phone, stretches his hamstrings. He totally did not realise the cat saga happening a mere 10 feet away from him, did he?

Then, suddenly, there’s a loud screech, and Evgenia is jumping back, holding her hand.

The cat whizzes past Yuzu so fast he can feel the air it stirs up, and then it’s climbing up Keiji’s leg.

Keiji screams, too, but the cat is undeterred. It makes it up to his shoulder before Keiji can shake it off, and even then, it’s still attempting to climb onto him and into his arms.

“He bit me!” Evgenia exclaims, holding up her bleeding finger. Alina, next to her, snickers. “Well, I told you not to grab at it like that.”

Keiji is still complaining, doing a funny little dance while the cat attempts to climb him like a tree. “Claws!!! Clawssss!!!”

The whole room is watching, at this point. If Shoma was here, he’s be laughing at Keiji, but then he’d probably help soon afterwards. Yuzu sighs, and steps closer to pick the little monster off Keiji’s arm by the scruff of its neck. It feels brutal to lift an animal like that, but it works, and at least this way, he can disentangle the claws from Keiji’s clothes and skin without getting scratched himself.

The cat goes still. Keiji stops yelling.

“Don’t let it scratch you!” Evgenia exclaims behind him, but it’s not necessary. It's weird. The cat just looks at Yuzu with large, round brown eyes. It blinks. Its limbs have gone limp in his grasp.

“Are you going to be friendly, now?” Yuzu asks it, half for show, half seriously. “You need to calm down, I promise nobody will hurt you!”

The cat blinks slowly once more. Yuzu shifts his grip, fits his other hand under its belly. The cat has a very, very fluffy and soft belly. It’s warm to the touch, but Yuzu can feel it’s rapid heartbeat, and it’s breath coming fast. It’s hard not to coo at it, but something about the look in the animal's eyes forbids such treatment.

“Ok, kitten. I am going to hold you, and you are going to be nice,” he tells the cat matter-of-factly and in Japanese. It’s probably not a Japanese cat, but animal languages are most likely universal. Winnie the Pooh speaks English. Maybe Yuzuru should speak English to the cat? But they are in Italy, and Yuzuru doesn’t speak any Italian at all. Japanese it is, then.

“Be nice,” he says, quietly, and he brings the cat’s body against his chest.

“Careful,” Keiji exclaims. There are bright red scratches all over his arms where the cat, in its panic, dug into skin rather than fabric. “It’s a stray, you don’t know-“

But it’s fine. The cat looks up at Yuzu. It’s not entirely black, as he had thought it was when it was just a blur being chased by teenage girls. There’s a slight orangey pattern to its longish, fluffy fur. It’s much smaller than it seemed, too. Just minutes ago, this animal looked imposing and mildly dangerous.

Now that he has it curled up in his arm, and can feel its heartbeat quieting, it is much smaller.

The cat yawns, and then it curls down, rubbing its head into the crook of Yuzu’s elbow.

“Awh,” Evgenia coos, quietly. She’s come up to Yuzu’s side while he was gentling the animal. Her hand is still bleeding, but she seems to have forgotten, because she is reaching out again.

“Don’t,” Yuzu snaps, and reflexively turns away. “Don’t scare him anymore.”

“Oh,” she says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, kitty, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Behind her, Keiji snorts. “It's okay... I didn’t do anything to the cat, and I look worse than you do!”

The tone of voice makes her look at him. She probably didn’t understand what he said, but she is smart enough to get the gist, because the state of bloody, scratched up and wounded that Keiji is in makes her eyes go wide.

“Doctors!” she says, and takes Keiji by the elbow. Over her shoulder, in Yuzu's, or maybe rather the cat’s direction, she says “Sorry, sorry,” again. Alina follows, with one last longing look at the bundle of fur that Yuzu is clutching to his chest.

Well. The cat isn’t so far impacting Yuzu’s lungs negatively, so he might as well hold on to it for a little longer. The weight of it is so nice and warm against his chest, after all. He walks up and down with the kitten held in his arms for a little while longer, until Kikuchi comes up to him to help him with his exercises.

“Who is this?” he asks, with a small glimmer in his eye. He holds out a hand for the kitten to sniff. It hasn’t shown an interest in anyone else since Yuzu picked it off Keiji like ripe fruit, but it sniffs Kikuchi’s fingers curiously. WHen he yields no food, it turns away. Then it buries its head in the crook of Yuzu’s arm again.

“Looks like you made a friend,” Kikuchi says, and smiles. “You’ll have to put the cat down for skating, though.”

Yuzu needs to prepare, he needs to finish his warm-up. He doesn’t want to, right now. His arms are getting tired, a little, too, and yet he wants to hold this cat forever; it is as tempting as video games at 2am. In the end, Kikuchi’s logic, and Brian and Tracy’s exasperated sighing win out, and Yuzu sets the cat down on the floor. He figures that it will run off to wherever Evgenia and Alina found it, but instead, the cat just looks up at him.

It gives a mournful meow.

“I can’t hold you the entire time,” Yuzu tells the cat. Kikuchi and Brian, watching, exchange amused glances. Yuzu goes down into a crouch to be closer to eye-sight with the cat. “Look, you hurt my friends, you’re being loud and a nuisance, and I really need you to let me finish my warm-up.”

The cat places a careful paw on Yuzu’s knee. Yuzu’s heart melts. Brian, behind him, makes a stifled, chocking sound that is probably aborted laughter, but Yuzuru will explain to this cat that he cannot be distracted from practice. He can do it. He can make it understand.

But first, he will pet it a little bit, just with a thumb between its small ears to smooth down the fluff there. Every single strand of fur on this animal’s body seems to want to point in a different direction. Yuzuru smooths the fur down as well as he can, first with just his fingers, then with both of his palms.

The fur doesn’t stick. The cat, though, takes this as an invitation, and places its other paw on Yuzu’s knee as well. It leans up, nose sniffling, and before Yuzu can withdraw, it has licked Yuzu’s cheek. If Yuzu’s heart was melting before, now it is his resolve that is ice cream in the sun.

“No,” he tells the cat. “No kissing. No petting. If you can wait patiently, I will play with you after practice.”

The cat, as if in answer, begins to purr under Yuzu’s hands. It vibrates with its entire body: not loud enough to be audible, but enough for Yuzu to feel it.

“I am not carrying this hell beast,” Brian says matter-of-factly when Yuzu finally draws away and returns to practice. “I saw what it did to your team mate.”

“It’s ok now,” Yuzu explains, “he was just scared.”

Brian shakes his head, but he’s fond. He thinks it is very cute, Yuzu can tell. He was the same way about Pooh, in the beginning. Embarrassed, like cute things aren’t for boys or men, but he learnt.

“Maybe you should hold it,” Yuzu proposes, “it might relax you!”

Tracy, by Brian’s side and watching with her usual sparkle in the corner of her eye, cracks a bigger smile at that. “Yes, Brian,” she jokes, “pick up the cat. Give us a cuddle.”

Brian does not pick up the cat. He watches Yuzu warm up, instead, throws a ball back and forth with him while they wait for the ice time allotted to his group. Tracy, on the other hand, kneels down and attempts to befriend the skittish animal lurking around the edges of Yuzu’s vision.

It’s quite difficult not to be aware that it is there, though it seems to have taken Yuzu’s words to heart and is now waiting patiently in the corner, stalking along the walls, avoiding people and their friendly, seeking hands. Every now and then, the cat raises its back, tail sticking up, and makes a terrifying noise.

Every time that happens, Yuzu can’t help but laugh a little.

The signal to enter the rink comes before Tracy’s attempts to lure the cat in with coaxing words and indirect eyesight has a chance to work.

Yuzu, skates on and ready to go, does not think the cat will follow where it is cold. But it does, weaving between legs, jumping onto the boards and then, before any of the skaters can stop it, onto the ice.

One of the volunteers by the rinkside, who are meant to keep peace and quiet, gasps. The cat, fluff all over the place and claws out, slides on the ice with gusto, spreading out until it is starfished out on the cold surface. It gives the ice a curious lick, and Yuzu thinks he can see it shudder from the taste. He didn't know cats could look disgusted. He also wonders what the ice tastes like to a kitten. The cat just slip-slides around, taking up speed only to starfish again.

There’s nothing to do but to follow. Yuzu skates out, reaching down to thank the ice for its support, feeling the cold, slippery layer of water under his fingertips, the hard ice beneath, and whispers his usual prayer. Stability.

The cat, a few meters on, gets back onto its feet again and shakes its entire body. Yuzu skates up to it. The cat stares at him with a familiar, steady warmth. It’s eyes are still huge, still very round and very brown in a shade that reminds Yuzu of something. Someone. He can’t quite place it.

He picks the cat up with both hands under its belly. It squirms, but doesn’t use its claws, so Yuzu brings it to the boards where Brian is hovering with the rest of his team.

“No,” Brian says. “I’m not holding the cat for you.”

Yuzu turns to Tracy, holding the squirming bundle of wet fur out to her. She laughs, shakes her head. “I don’t think this animal particularly likes me.”

Yuzu turns the cat around, and it allows itself to be manhandled without protest, letting itself be cuddles up against his chest again. It’s looking up at him, when he checks. “Do you really not like anyone?”

He speaks English for Tracy and Brian’s sake, and the cat ignores him and buries its face in Yuzu’s jacket again.

“Seems to like you just fine,” Tracy says. She exchanges a look with Brian, who shrugs. “You might as well hold onto it for the moment, if you really want to. It’s not like you were planning on jumping much today, anyway.”

The cat snuggles into a fold of Yuzu's jacket. Yuzu looks down at the cat. It lifts its head and yawns, revealing sharp white teeth and pink gums, and snuggles in further, making itself comfortable.

Really, Yuzu was planning on at least a few jumps today. At least the triple axel he might have attempted a few times. But he’s been solid, in practice, and he is only here because he promised not to overdo it, because he can rely on his training and not push it too much right now. He's not resting on his laurels, he's just resting his ankles.

Maybe the cat is a sign for Yuzu to take it easy. The cat purrs in Yuzu’s hands. Yeah.

He can imagine the kind of picture this will create: Yuzuru Hanyu, two time Olympic gold medalist and defending world champion, skating in the official practice with a sleepy stray cat curled up in his arms. But to be fair, it makes him work on his balance, his edges have to be perfect to work through his step sequence with the additional weight of it, and he practices that until his thighs burn and his arms feel lame and numb.

“I have to set you down,” he tells the cat again, after twenty minutes of this. “It’s time for proper practice, now. Full power.”

The cat doesn’t reply, not even with a glance. It looks asleep, actually. But it is still purring gently, and the vibration of it buries itself into Yuzu’s body as well. It calms him in an unexpected way, takes away some of the pressure and the stress, and opens up his chest.

He’s sorry to place the cat in Kikuchi’s waiting palms. He leaves his jacket with them, and watches as Kikuchi makes a nest of it for the sleeping kitten, with the same careful hands that work knots out of Yuzu’s muscles and help him stretch, warm up and down. He trusts his team, he trusts them with his life. He knows they’ll take care of anything he leaves with them.

And yet, the memory of holding something small, so fragile and easily startled, and the trust of it, it weighs Yuzu down. He allows others to treat him like he just treated this creature, and yet he can’t seem to find it within himself to extend the same care and recognition of physical limitation to himself.

“I should be the cat,” Yuzu finds himself murmuring. He focuses on the entry to the triple axel, a sequence of movements to familiar that it feels easy as breathing. His ankle aches slightly, when he lands it. All following jumps ache, too. The thought has places gentle claws in the back of Yuzu’s mind, and he can’t shake it. "Just nap every day. Cat life sounds nice."

“You aren’t keeping the cat,” Brian tells Yuzu after he has warmed down and back in casual clothes. Brian sounds like he had a long think in the time Yuzu was on the ice. He sounds like he has his argumentation all settled in his mind, whereas Yuzu doesn't have a single thought right now. 

“You can’t keep it, I’m sorry. It might make your asthma play up, and it’s. It’s a cat. Javi has a cat, you’re not…”

“I could have a cat,” Yuzu frowns. “I can take care of things.”

“Have you talked to your mother about this?” Brian frowns. “How happy would she be if you decided to adopt a stray from a foreign country? How would you even bring this cat to Toronto? Would it even live in Toronto? Do you want to bring it to Japan with you? There are a lot of logistics attached to this, Yuzu, I’m sorry but. You have to consider that this is a living being, not another plush toy.”

Yuzu listens. Brian’s rant makes something unlock in his chest, something small and bitter and angry at the world. Yuzu knows all of this. Yuzu has known this cat for maybe an hour and he hasn’t really, fully planned anything for it. It just likes him.

Isn't it enough to just like something? Someone? Why does everything have to be so complicated.

In the end, he can’t find the words to answer. He just nods, not entirely certain how much of his uncertain bitterness shows in the expression on his face. Probably more than Yuzu would like, because Brian’s face falls. “Look, Yuzu, I don’t mean-“

But Yuzu nods, shakes his head, creates an unconvincing smile. “No, I understand. No cat.”

He turns and walks back to where his jacket is still lying abandoned by the boards, cat curled up on it, leaving black and orange fur all over it. It’s fully asleep, lighter belly fur poking out under it, eyes closed and tongue peeking out just a little.

“I have to make you go home,” Yuzu tells the cat. It stays asleep. He doesn’t want to wake it up. He had a nice practice with this little furry monster, even if it did bite his one friend and completely scratched up the other. “I have to go back to the hotel now, so I need my jacket,” he tells it, and tugs at the fabric. “You have to wake up and let me say goodbye.”

The cat, instead, digs claws into the fabric. Yuzu can see that it has woken up, but it is still lying on its side, faking relaxation. It reminds Yuzu of Shoma, how he’ll pretend to be asleep when he doesn’t want to talk. How he can sleep through anything, conked out backstage or in the green room.

“Hey,” Yuzu whispers. “What if I just take you with me for now. And then I will bring you to a cat shelter maybe tomorrow.”

The cat’s tail waves. Yuzu knows this doesn’t mean the same in cats as it does in dogs, but the cat is also purring, so it must agree. He wraps it in his jacket and presses it to his chest. Any fur poking out he will not explain.

There are at least five people in the world who might figure out Yuzu’s expression: His parents, his sister, his childhood best friend. The fifth is a wildcard for the people who might know Yuzu’s shamefaced expression well but might not call him on it. None of these people are on the shuttle bus back to the hotel with him, as Yuzu pets the cat he placed in his backpack. The cat is calm, hiding, dark eyes looking up at Yuzu from the darkness inside of his back.

He strokes a careful finger over its head. “We’re good,” he tells it, “nobody will find you.”

He does not expect Mihoko to come knocking on his door a few hours later. Of all the people he expected, she is the last. He has to rush to hide the kitten, which is happily napping on Yuzu’s pillow, under a blanket. The cat meows forbiddingly. It’s a little scary that after just a few hours Yuzu can tell exactly what its noises mean.

“Have you seen Shoma?” Mihoko asks. “I thought he might be here, playing games.”

Yuzu shakes his head. It’s weird, how everybody seems to be looking for Shoma. He’s probably just in bed, napping. “Isn’t he in his room?”

“No, I checked. He’s not with Keiji, either. It’s very unlike him!”

It truly is. “I’ll call around, see if anyone has seen or heard of him.”

Mihoko sighs, leaning against the door frame for a moment. “I let him off this morning, because practice was so early, but maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“He might just be out at a restaurant? He’ll be back,” he tells her. It rings true: Shoma is quite capable of taking care of himself. Sure, he’s awkward and shy and a little bit weird, but he’s an adult. He’s grown a lot in the past season, while Yuzu wasn’t there. “He’ll be okay, for sure.”

Mihoko smiles at him. “It’s nice that you have such faith in him. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear you talk this way.”

She bows, and before Yuzu can bow in return, she has turned back and hurried down the hallway.

The cat meows again, crawling out from under the duvet that Yuzu threw over it. He isn’t entirely certain Mihoko would have even noticed an elephant hanging out in Yuzu’s room, unless that elephant was Shoma-shaped. He might as well not have angered the cat, because angry it is. It meows again, so Yuzu falls down onto the bed next to it, and curls his fingers into its fluffy fur to pacify the cat.

“I wonder where he is?” he talks out loud. The cat looks at him. Sometimes Yuzu feels like it is implicitly calling him an idiot, wondering at how Yuzu can be so dumb. He doesn’t know. He just scratches the cat under its chin until its eyes close and it begins purring again. They cuddle for a while, cat on Yuzu’s chest and Yuzu on the bed, falling asleep due to the soothing vibration of putting and the warmth of cat. “I really do wonder,” Yuzu murmurs, “it’s weird he’s not around.”

The cat purrs louder. “I kind of miss him,” he tells it, “you know? I’ve barely been around, and we have so little time together, it’s nice to hang out when we can. So when he does stuff like this, just disappearing, and not coming to practice or sleeping through dinner plans, that sucks.”

The cat shifts, curling its body on Yuzu’s chest until it’s little head is pressed under his jaw. It feels almost like a hug.

“I kind of miss him,” Yuzu whispers, “you know? You’re a cat, you wouldn’t know. But I’m glad you’re here. Now I know why Javi has a cat: at least with cat, I don’t feel alone. Just a little lonely.”

The cat impossibly snuggles even closer, little head with its little nose pressing wetly against Yuzu's skin. Yuzu tangles his fingers into the cat's warm, soft fur and holds on. He falls asleep without noticing, deep in thought.

 

 


	2. kitty cat, kitty cat, where have you been?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is for everyone who missed the cat-car typo at the end of the last chapter :D
> 
> thank you to verit for finding it (and a lot of other mistakes), you're the best <3

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s something intrinsically soothing about napping with someone. Legs tangled with legs, back to chest, arms wrapped around warmth, even breath against the back of his neck. It’s a childhood feeling, something he hasn’t had in a long time, but remembers well. Shifting closer to Saya, or his dad, letting himself be held like he’s small again.

There’s a humming somewhere in the room, somewhere in the back of Yuzu’s mind, but Yuzu shifts closer to the warmth along his back and ignores it. He’s so comfortable, caught in the hazy feeling of receding sleep. If he doesn’t open his eyes he might fall back into his dream again. It’s too good a feeling to give up, so Yuzu sighs, and shifts so his face is turned from the lights.

The next time he wakes it is because his phone, set on vibrate as always, is buzzing annoyingly. He also wakes because the cat’s tail is on his face, tickling Yuzu’s eye and forehead. He blinks, shifts away, and remembers that his phone is where he left it: in the pocket of his jacket, which is in his backpack, which is by the door, which is... too far away.

He stretches, instead. He feels rested down to his bones, which crack as he begins bending and straightening his arms, curving his back and twisting his hips, wallowing in the satisfaction of hearing the pops as his joints release tension. He’s turning and bending his ankles when the cat climbs onto Yuzu’s belly.

It meows a pathetic, scratchy little noise, and digs its little claws into the skin of Yuzu’s stomach as it sits down. Yuzu, experimentally, meows back. The cat looks at Yuzu like he’s committed a crime, wide-eyed and horrified. It meows again, with more strength. Yuzu meows back. The cat stares.

Yuzu’s phone keeps vibrating.

Yuzu, not one to be outdone by a cat, wiggles his stomach. The cat digs its claws in a little harder, as if in warning. It makes a low rumbly noise, and makes to get up and climb off of him. It’s funny, how interacting with it is almost like having a conversation.

“I should probably name you,” Yuzu says, “I keep calling you cat. That’s a bit weird.”

The cat sits down again. It looks expectant.

“But then, if I name you, I’ll want to keep you. And Brian’s right. I can’t keep you, kitten.”

When the cat doesn’t move, just looks at Yuzu steadily, Yuzu sighs. He reaches up to scratch at its head, where the fur is sticking up a little between its ears, and then combs back the scruff around its neck. “I’m sorry,” he says, quieter. “I wish I could, you’re a good cat.”

The cat nods, leans into his touch. Then, to Yuzu’s amusement, it rolls to its back, and presents his belly for scratches as well. It’s such a show of trust that Yuzu can’t help but stare for a moment. A few hours ago, this cat was scratching people out of fear, and ducking away from hands, and here they are: cuddling, napping, offering each other belly rubs.

He sits up a little against the headboard, and finally complies, running his fingertips over the long strands of fur, the soft, warm, vulnerable belly beneath. It makes him smile more than the petulant look of it sitting on his belly demanding a name did.

The phone’s vibration has become a background white noise, mixing in with the cat’s gentle purring, and the low sound of cars passing by down on the street of the hotel. He should pick up the phone and at least check his messages, but he doesn’t want to disturb the cat.

It is purring like a washing machine now, eyes closed and head tilted back in a way that makes its tongue peak out. It’s a little goofy, and very, very adorable. If Yuzu had his phone, he could probably take a video of it, for later. Maybe he could make someone share it, to make sure the cat is adopted by someone nice who would care for it well. Maybe Misha or Javi would know how to do that, they are both active on social media.

“How do I find you a home?” Yuzu asks the kitten. The kitten doesn’t reply. It seems preoccupied with getting Yuzu to gently scratch a spot just under the thick band of fur around its neck, twisting and turning and making funny, small noises. “Maybe if a skater adopted you, I could visit,” he offers.

The cat stops purring. It looks up, twisting its neck in a way that makes Yuzu laugh, and then it rolls over and down right onto its paws. That’s a no, then, Yuzu thinks.

“Do you not want me to visit you?” he asks the cat. It saunters off, weaving around the half-open door into the bathroom. It was more of a rhetoric question anyway, as Yuzu doesn’t even manage to visit his family more than a few times a year. How would he visit a cat in a foreign country. “Maybe I could keep up with you over social media,” he says, and rolls off the bed as well.

His back cracks again, as if for good measure. The phone has ceased vibrating apart in his bag, which is a bad sign. Yuzu sighs and goes to dig it out. It takes a while and leaves a bunch of used tissues, food wrappers, and the pooh box cover spread messily across his floor, but Yuzu manages to locate the little machine.

Of course it ran out of battery. Of course. He looks for the charger, plugs it in, waits for the bar to show him that the phone is alive, and then he leaves it on his bed to charge. He can look at the ten thousand missed messages and calls later. If it was really important, someone would have knocked on his door already.

Instead, he checks the bathroom for entirely different sighs of life.

The cat, he discovers, has made a mess in the tub, and is now sitting in front of the mirror.

“Gross,” Yuzu tells it. The cat continues staring at itself. “But at least you didn’t do your business on the bed. Or the carpet.” He points the shower head towards the drain and flushes it all away. “Actually, considering the situation... this was actually very smart.”

The cat’s tail wags. It is now staring at Yuzu’s image in the mirror, so he bows a little thank you. He doesn’t expect the cat to attempt to bow back, and maybe he is misreading the gesture. But the cat dips down. Its tail points up. It wiggles at Yuzu-in-the-mirror, and then, suddenly, jumps at him. Yuzu startles. The cat meets the mirror face first with a thunk.

The look on the cat’s face is priceless. The look on Yuzu’s face is priceless as well, when he catches himself in the mirror. The cat, more careful now, extends a paw. The paw meets the mirrored paw.

The cat jumps back in horror, scruff standing up all along its back, claws out, terrified.

“What is happening?” Yuzu wonders. He doesn’t know whether it is oa good idea to touch an upset cat, but he did yesterday and it seemed it help? The cat, creeping forward on its belly, swats at its mirror image. It doesn’t scratch up the surface, but it tries. It tries very hard.

Yuzu deliberates, for a second, before he buries both hands in the dense fur, and lifts the entire tense, angry monster up. He turns it around until the cat is facing towards his chest and away from the mirror. “There is no other cat here,” he tells it. “You are the only cat. So you don’t have to fight yourself, ok?”

The cat makes a displeased noise and swats at Yuzu. It doesn’t have its claws out, so he knows it doesn’t mean it. “Hey now,” he says, and rocks up and down, “it’ll be okay. If you calm down, things will work themselves out.”

He walks back into the main room, rocking back and forth like the cat is a baby. It should feel odd, but it just feels like comforting a friend, like rocking back and forth in a hug with Javi or Jun Hwan, when they’re frustrated by practice or after competition. When Yuzu is frustrated by practice and competition.

“They always do,” he murmurs. “Things have a way of looking less terrible in hindsight, I promise.”

After a few minutes of bouncing and talking, he can feel the cat relax. Eyes half-closed, head pillowed on Yuzu’s chest, it’s adorable. And now, Yuzu has a phone handy, so he can actually record this moment.

He sits on the bed and restarts his phone. It buzzes, but it stops soon after. He ignores the angry red notifications on his apps and swipes up for the camera.

He walks back into the bathroom, and shifts so he is holding the kitten in one arm, supporting its body securely. The cat shifts, rubbing its head against Yuzu’s neck. Yuzu’s heart melts a little. If he spends a good ten minutes just stroking along the fluffy fur on top of its ears, nobody will ever know. When he looks at the series of pictures he snapped, he isn’t surprised at the goofy, soft smile he’s showing the camera.

It doesn’t matter. Nobody but people he trusts will see this photo. But he does want to share.

“Hey,” he writes to Javi. “You CANNOT tell Brian about this, but. Look.”

The photo uploads slowly. The cat is a warm weight on Yuzu’s chest, sleep-heavy and purring again. He could get used to this. Perhaps he could just zip up his hoodies and team jackets over them both and claim that he has gained weight after the Olympics?

Javi’s reply comes minutes later. “IS THAT A CAT???” Yuzu sends back a cheeky smiley in lieu of words. He knows Javi has more to say and he is right: “WHAT??? MORE PICS, YUZU. MORE!!!”

Trust Javi to be all-caps about Yuzu taking in a stray. No doubts, no questions, just demands. If he was here, he would have no doubt helped Yuzu smuggle the cat into the hotel, not that Yuzu didn’t manage well enough without him. Yuzu can totally do this without Javi.

Yuzu snaps another photo, awkwardly close-up, to capture the cats sleepy face. “It purrs a lot,” he adds.

Javi sends back laughter. “Can you blame it? What’s it called?”

“I haven’t named the cat,” Yuzu writes, “I can’t keep a cat. It’s just for now.”

“Oh,” Javi replies, with three sad faces. “Well have you fed this nameless cat yet? You know cats are always starving.”

Yuzu has not. He hasn’t even considered that his cat may be hungry. He doesn’t know when it has last eaten. Maybe it has never eaten! Yuzu is a terrible cat-carer.

He also doesn’t know where to get food or how to get it. When he tells Javi, there is no reply for a few minutes. Then, just when Yuzu thinks about maybe sneaking into the hotel kitchen and bribing a sous chef with autographs and money, there’s a reply.

“It’s taken care of. Someone should be knocking on your door in half an hour.”

Yuzu does now know how and whom Javi convinced to go shopping for cat food at 10 pm in the evening, but he doesn’t doubt that Javi did just that. He can be incredibly convincing. If anyone should know, it’s Yuzu, who has taken part in too many inadvisable shenanigans for Javi’s sake over the course of their shared training.

“Thank you,” he types in, “you’re the best.”

He doesn’t have to wait for a reply this time. “I know,” Javi writes. “I wish I was there with you.”

Yeah… Yuzu wishes, too. There’s another message seconds later. “I can’t believe there’s a cat at worlds in the one year I do not compete.”

It cracks Yuzu up again. He can never stay sad around Javi. He will miss him, but he doesn’t think he will have to miss him for too long. Javi has plans. Yuzu will help him in any way he can: he owes Javi too much, a debt of support and friendship that Yuzu won’t ever repay because Javi just keeps giving and giving. It is easy to stay friends with him, after everything they have weathered as teammates.

“I miss you,” Yuzu writes, hugging the cat in his arms a little closer. “Come visit soon.”

Javi sends back a big smile, and then a “you come first. My parents miss you.”

The cat, held too tightly, squirms free of Yuzu’s grasp and throws him an offended look. That, too, makes Yuzu laugh. “Sorry, sorry,” he tells it.

He observes as it jumps off the bed and goes to investigate the closet. There is nothing in there but Yuzu’s case-of-emergency skates and a bunch of used socks, so Yuzu lets the cat do its thing and checks who was trying to reach him so insistently.

He has about seventeen calls, all from different members of the Japanese federation who are meant to look after the skaters. There’s three messages from Satton, a few by Keiji, and a surprising text from Kaori, who is somehow fully informed of ongoing events at this competition despite not being a part of it, and about ten more calls by Kana.

Satton’s messages ask if he’s seen Shoma. So do Keiji’s and Kaori’s. It’s like everybody is concerned about Shoma’s disappearance except for him.

Well, no. He has a few messages from Waka, asking him if he knows where to get band-aids that have Sailor Moon characters on them. He knows exactly whom those would be for.

This doesn’t make Yuzu feel less restless and guilty.

“Sorry,” he texts back in one big group chat. “I haven’t seen Shoma all day. Is he maybe with friends?”

The replies trickle in over the next few minutes. Yuzu watches the cat chase its own tail. It seems strangely concerned with the existence of the tail, spending a few minutes just staring at where the tail is moving, before trying to jump at it.

“What other friends?” Keiji snarks.

The longer the cat goes on chasing, the funnier it looks. Yuzu thought only dogs chased their tails like that, but seeing the cat do it is even more hilarious.

Yuzu takes a video and sends it to Javi.

His phone begins buzzing without break immediately, and shit.

Shit.

Yuzu sent it to the team Japan group chat.

“WHAT IS THAT?” Kaori writes. All-caps, just like Javi. They would get along so well.

Similar responses from the rest of the team, except for Chris, who doesn’t write anything at all. Yuzu would like to perish, because he can’t very well explain that he took in the rink cat because it is adorable and it likes him. That sounds pathetic. Instead, he puts the phone away and thinks of people who might have seen Shoma.

Yuzu is still half-convinced that Shoma is just sleeping in his room, unawares that everyone is panicking about him, but Mihoko said she checked and he wasn’t in. But Shoma also isn’t friends with anyone outside of team Japan, nobody whom he would hang out with for an entire day without needing at least a short respite.

He’s also always on his phone, because he’s always using it to game. He has two charging packs that he carries around with him because he has to upkeep his standings. He’s explained this to Yuzu several times, because Yuzu was laughing too hard at Shoma’s determined little face and his determined little fists to properly listen the first few times. There is no way Shoma wouldn’t be on his phone for an entire day unless something happened to him.

There’s a knock on the door.

“Delivery!” Javi texts him, so Yuzu goes to check who it is. He’s surprised to see Alina standing there, arms crossed over her chest and wobbling from leg to leg.

“Hello,” he says, opening the door a little more. Alina smiles, nervous and quick, and lifts an elbow with a white plastic shopping bag that looks filled with treats. “Oh,” Yuzu says, “that’s... a lot. Did Javi send you?”

She nods, smiles again.

“But it’s so late!” Yuzu exclaims.

“No,” Alina says, “I mean. Yes. But I didn’t buy anything now. I bought this before, after practice. I am just bringing it to you now, instead of to the rink tomorrow. For the cat.” She speaks English slowly, hesitating before words, and Yuzu is almost sure her grammar isn’t entirely correct, but then... neither is his. He got the gist, anyway.

It makes it easy to smile at her, because she seems uncomfortable, but she also thought to buy food and toys for a cat she met once and might never have met again. He steps to the side, and Aline looks around for the furry pile of confusion and anger that Yuzu took in. The cat has climbed onto the bed and is sitting, tense and perched to run, on the pillow.

“Hey,” Alina says, quietly. She hands Yuzu the bag. “I want to stand here. Until the cat is good.”

And then she closes the door behind her, and leans against it, studying her shoes. It’s a little weird, but she seems quite confident that that is the way to befriend a cat. “Why?” Yuzu asks anyway.

“I read up? ...On cats, stray cats. And the internet says that cats are curious. They will come when we are still and don’t look, because humans are big and scary and they don’t trust.”

It makes sense. “I also bought fun toys. Because hotel rooms are boring.”

Yuzu grabs the first thing without looking: a plush mouse that smells a little funny. The cat’s ears perk up, and it wanders over to where Yuzu has sat down on the corner of the bed closest to the door. Yuzu throws the little mouse in a high arch. The cat, stranger danger forgotten, leaps after it, and catches the toy with surprising agility.

And here Yuzu thought all this particular cat wanted was to snuggle and sleep.

Alina giggles softly at the cat’s antics, and slides down the door to sit on the floor.

There’s a few tubs of wet food at the bottom of the shopping bag, and a thing of dry food, too. He doesn’t have a bowl to put it in, so he just opens one, and takes it into the bathroom. The main room has carpet floors, and Yuzu doesn’t want to smell like cat food for the next few days.

The cat ignores him, fully invested in taking apart the mouse and getting at what’s inside. Whatever it is, it smells slightly like lawn. It also makes the cat go insane in about fifteen minutes.

It’s strange to sit in silence like that. He watches Alina watch the cat play. It’s probably the first time he’s seen her relaxed. It’s nice: Yuzu remembers being a kid with too much weight on his shoulders.

“Hey,” he asks, after a few more minutes of watching as the cat rolls around on the floor, clutching at the mouse and chewing it apart at the seams with dedications. “Do you maybe know how to find a shelter? Or, a home for cats?”

It makes Alina frown and that, in turn, makes Yuzu feel like an ass for destroying her moment.

The cat, having finally reached the center of the toy and now realizing that there is, in fact, nothing in there, gets back up and slinks around her. Alina sits very still and looks at Yuzu, rather than the cat. It reaches out with its paw in that very human way it has, and places it on her knee. And then, before Alina can react in any way, it has run away. Yuzu is pretty sure it’s hiding in the bathroom, and completely uninterested in the food he’s placed there.

That’s okay.

Alina, shell shocked and looking weirdly touched, gets up. “I don’t know about shelters,” she says. “I will ask? Maybe the other skaters will know?” She opens the door. “Zhenya will help,” she says, “Misha. Misha will help, too!”

“Thank you,” Yuzu stutters out. It’s strange that she’s just… leaving. Alina closes the door behind her.

It is late, he thinks. She should have been in bed hours ago, she’s just a kid. But he also wishes the kitten had allowed her to hold it for a little while. She looked so happy for it to just be close.

It’s strange that the cat only really seems to like Yuzu. And, well. And Keiji. Judging from the way the cat had jumped him earlier in the day.

When he goes to check on the cat, it is sitting a little too still, staring at itself in the mirror again. The food, as expected, is untouched.

“You’re a weird one,” Yuzu tells the cat.

It’s a little wide-eyed, like when it was scared out of its wits this morning. Or maybe it is just a thirsty cat: the tap is right there. Yuzu didn’t consider that cats are hungry animals, and he will not forget about the need of mammals to hydrate. The cat, still looking dazed, rolls itself over the counter and back. He doesn’t know cats, this might be a reasonable conclusion. He could ask Javi, or he could just open the tap.

He opens the tap. At the noise of flowing water, the cat looks up at him, and then over to where the sink is filling, the water collecting there faster than it can flow down the drain. Hotels are like that sometimes: people don’t take care of things properly, because they aren’t theirs, not really. It’s sad, that people don’t take care of borrowed goods as well as they do of things they own, when really, borrowed goods should be treated with more care.

Yuzu shrugs at the cat and looks at himself in the mirror. His hair is a mess from his nap, and there’s cat hair stuck to his black shirt. But he looks rested, the shadows under his eyes fading.

When the cat doesn’t move, just watches him curiously, Yuzu dips his hands under the faucet and makes a bowl. He brings it up to his mouth.The water is tepid. He drinks deeply regardless.

The cat is still watching him intently, but it is moving closer, carefully, as if uncertain of its physicality. Uncertain of itself. “Are you afraid of water?”

The cat moves even closer. Yuzu leans up, and it fits itself on the border between the decline of the sink and Yuzu’s hip. Where it leans against him, Yuzu feels warm. The cat’s fur is wet from when it rolled around earlier, water caught in the long strands of fur on its back and belly.

“That would be slightly stereotypical of you,” Yuzu adds, after a moment. “You should drink. Drinking is good.”

As if it understands, the cat moves around the sink until it can hover by the faucet. There is no easy way for it to reach without committing to a little wetness: climb into the sink or at least get its paws into the water.

Instead, it meows. It looks at Yuzu, and it meows, and for a moment, that complaining noise sounds just like Shoma when he’s struggling with something he knows Yuzu could easily fix for him: high up in his throat, a helpless little squeal. Overwhelmed by a question and not putting together the answer together quickly enough, unable to climb onto a chair, this familiar small noise dissolving into full-bellied laughter. That one time he couldn’t get his headset to work.

Yuzu didn’t think it was a conscious noise, just something Shoma does, unaware that anyone would notice or care.

The cat meows again, more sustained this time. It stretches a paw toward the water, and just before dipping it in, it pulls back and looks up at him. Its eyes are round and dark and weirdly human, Yuzu thinks, and then shakes his head. That’s ridiculous.

But Shoma disappeared and Yuzu got this cat instead. Where could he be?

No. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably the guilt, because Yuzu doesn’t feel as worried about Shoma as he should.

He looks at the cat. It does look a little like… The cat dips its head, tilting to the side like a question. Like Yuzu is behaving in a way that simply does not compute, or like he asked a question that isn’t easily answered. Like it is thinking.

“Hey,” he asks the cat. “Are you Shoma?”

The cat stares at him. It straightens its head.

Yuzu laughs, a little awkwardly. Scruffy, fluffy fur. Just because a cat is black, and orange, and looks a little bit like your friend doesn’t mean… anything.  

“Of course not.”

He scratches between the cat’s little ears, and then he goes to find a cup, or a bowl or something for the cat to drink out of. But just as he goes through the door, the cat meows again. Yuzu runs around. He narrows his eyes at it. The cat licks its paw like it made no noise at all.

“Do you know where he is, though?”

The cat stares at him, blank again. Yuzu is going insane. That’s the only answer.

“I am going to sleep,” Yuzu says, more to himself than the cat. Probably. “And you can come cuddle, or stay here and drink. And Shoma will turn up sooner or later because he is not a cat.”

Yuzu texts back to the group chat, which has calmed down about the cat video, while he brushes his teeth. Waka sent a picture of Zhenya with bandaids all over her fingers, captioned “control your beast”. It’s a little funny.

Nobody has found Shoma or anyone who has seen him.

It’s late. Yuzuru has Mihoko’s number, but he doesn’t want to ring her this late at night. It feels rude to try, when he hasn’t been all that worried about Shoma up to this moment. Instead, he calls the hotel, gets her room number from them. It won’t hurt to check in with her in person, make sure she’s alright.

He takes the cat along only because it follows him to the door and demands to leave the room by slinking across Yuzu’s shins. His secret is out anyway, it’s not like the others won’t spill sooner or later. He might as well let the cat accompany him. For once, he doesn’t lift it and carry it around. Instead, he takes one of Alina’s toys and walks, hoping for the best. The cat, whether because of the toy or because of Yuzu, just follows him, winding around his legs as he goes, making walking difficult.

By the time they’re on the right floor, Yuzu feels like the cat is guiding, and Yuzu is merely following along, because it finds Mihoko’s door with such pinpoint accuracy.

Yuzu knocks. Mihoko, looking frazzled and upset, opens after a few moments. The following series of events is more confusing than anything else has been so far: Mihoko looks at Yuzu, and then down. The cat, usually skittish around strangers, runs at Mihoko like it has missed her really badly, and Yuzu...

Well, Yuzu feels like this confirms about nothing and everything.

“Oh,” Mihoko says, at the cat’s onslaught of affection. It almost looks like the cat is trying to hug her. It’s a little strange, from such an untrusting animal.

“Uh,” Yuzu starts. It isn’t how he wanted to start, not really. Usually he starts with a polite hello. “Do you know this cat?”

“I don’t know,” Mihoko answers. She looks less frazzled by the second. The cat meows, low and yet demanding.

“It isn’t usually this friendly with people.”

“I see.” She bends down and picks up Yuzu’s usually antisocial, very sleepy kitten. The cat cuddles into Mihoko’s arms. Yuzu is not jealous.

It was just nice to feel special.

“Hi,” Mihoko says, and the cat meows again. It is looking at Mihoko very intently, like it is trying to communicate something through its eyes that Yuzuru was too blind to see. It is a different kind of meowing than Yuzu got. Again: not jealous.

“You look familiar,” Mihoko notes. “Doesn’t he look familiar to you?”

Something about her has eased, now that she is holding the cat. She’s started smiling again.

“I mean,” Yuzu starts to wonder if coming here was smart, or even helpful, “I don’t know?”

It makes Mihoko smile wider. Something about her makes Yuzu feel a little odd: like she knows more than she lets on, or like she sees through him. He asked Shoma about it just once, and Shoma smiled a little secretive smile, and gave Yuzu a non-answer like he sometimes does to journalists. That was a very unsatisfactory conversation, Yuzu has to admit.

“Hi,” Mihoko says again, and carries the cat into her room. Yuzu, still dumbstruck, follows. “Who charmed you, huh?”

“Nobody,” Yuzu says.

“Oh, no,” she laughs, “not you. You’re fine. But do close the door behind you, please.”

“Have you found Shoma yet?” Yuzu asks her, because Mihoko’s intent focus on the cat is making him a little uncomfortable. The shift from concerned to relaxed that happened in the span of a few seconds is overwhelming and unexpected and Yuzu wants to grab the cat out of her arms and leave. Maybe have another nap.

“Maybe,” Mihoko says and pets the cat. “Say, Yuzu. Can you do me a favour? Call Kikuchi. Tell him I need some help.”

“Do you think he knows where Shoma is?” Yuzu wonders. He wouldn’t be surprised, Kikuchi knows all kinds of things. He has a way of listening that disarms people: Shoma might have mentioned something off-hand that would serve as a clue.

“Maybe,” Mihoko insists. The cat has started purring. She gently guides Yuzu out of her room by the shoulder. “Call him, please.”

Then the door closes behind Yuzu. He is now without information about Shoma’s whereabouts and without cat. It feels strangely lonely. There wasn’t enough time for Yuzu to truly get used to the company, and yet... His hands feel empty.

He fishes his phone out of his pocket. Kikuchi, to his surprise, is still up, and willing to come to Mihoko’s room. Fifteen minutes later, Yuzu is still alone in the hallway because both his and Shoma’s trusted advisors locked up inside with a stray cat.

Yuzu paces.

He walks up the corridor until he hits the dead end, and then he walks back and stops before Mihoko’s door.

He pulls out his phone and replies to his teammates inquiries in regards to stray cats, sends Javi the video he accidentally fired off into the wrong chat, and gets Alina’s number out of Misha to tell her thank you. He replies to Waka with a silly selfie of his own, and sends Zhenya a little message, too.

Then he paces some more.

He could just return to his room, prepare to go to bed, do through his usual routine of stretching and rehabilitation exercises. Maybe he could have a snack, clean away the food his cat didn’t touch. Maybe he should bring the entire grocery bag over, since the cat likes Mihoko better.

He doesn’t do any of these things. Instead, he stands there, idling and lost, until Mihoko’s door opens, and Kikuchi comes out.

“So,” Yuzu starts. “What--”

“Here’s your little friend,” Mihoko smiles, and presses a purring budle into Yuzu’s arms. Kikuchi has made his way down the hallway before Yuzu can even take another breath, and Mihoko keeps his attention with a movement of her hand, a pat on his forearm that is strangely comforting. “He was a great help to us.”

“Don’t worry about Shoma,” she adds. “He’ll be back by the morning.”

Her door closes in Yuzu’s face. The cat in his arms digs gentle claws into his forearm. When Yuzu looks down at it, he almost thinks it might be smiling.

But that can’t be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout-out to the folks on twitter who provided photos of cats that look exactly like Shoma!cat. 
> 
> also a big!! BIG!!! thank you to [3aoutofnowhere](https://3aoutofnowhere.tumblr.com/post/171456968951/one-antisocial-cat-for-sleepyshoma) and and [yuzshos](https://twitter.com/yuzshos/status/970146907405238279) who made art!!! for this!! fic!!!


	3. kitty cat, kitty cat, what's going on?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> worlds seems to be stressing everybody out, so have this chapter <3

 

* * *

 

 

“If Shoma turns up tomorrow morning with some insane story about how he got lost and had to sleep in a bus station,” Yuzu mutters, “I’m going to disappear him myself and nobody will miss him at all.”

He gathers the cat a little closer to his chest and stares at Mihoko’s door morosely. Exactly nothing has been resolved. The cat gives a mournful meow. Yuzu feels a pang of guilt and loosens his grip, giving the cat a few strokes down its back until it starts purring again.

“Sorry,” Yuzu says, “ but I mean it. First he wanders off without telling anyone, and then we all worry, and weird cat things happen that make me consider whether maybe the stories about werewolves are real which is of course ridiculous, and he’s probably going to turn up tomorrow morning and tell us that he has married someone and spent his one-day honeymoon eating all the meats in Italy and that he’s retiring to stay here forever and I’ll never see him again.”

Now Yuzu is just talking just to talk. He knows it. Anyone else would stop his hyperactive rambling at this point, call Yuzu on his bullshit, stop him before he can talk himself into circles. Not the cat. Yuzu sets it down in his room, closes the door behind them. Here’s a good listener: lets Yuzu rant until he is all talked out, and then just sits on his lap and purrs like it’s fine.

Like this is going to resolve itself with a little more time, with a little patience. Yuzu is terrible at patience: he has never been able to pace himself, he’s never been good at waiting. He wants what he wants when he wants it. He wants Shoma home right now.

Yuzu breathes. He pets the cat with monotonous, even strokes across its back. The cat purrs louder.

Mihoko seemed confident in her statement. Maybe Kikuchi did know something about Shoma’s whereabouts, and told her, and they are going to get him back.

Yuzu doesn’t know why they needed his cat to talk to each other, but if it means finding Shoma, he won’t complain too much. He clutches the kitten closer, presses his fingers deep into its fur. The cat complains, bites at his fingers until Yuzu lets up.

“Sorry,” he says, quiet now. He’s so tired. “Sorry, sorry.”

He expects the cat to jump off his lap and go curl up on his pillow again, but it doesn’t. Instead, it turns, balancing precariously on Yuzu’s knees and thighs, and headbutts him in the face. It’s almost a gentle headbutt: the top of its head against Yuzu’s chin, and then the cat curls closer, rubbing itself into the nook there with enough pressure to make Yuzu laugh despite himself. “Determined,” he tells the cat, and the cat turns in a full circle, claws digging into Yuzu’s skin for purchase, and repeats the motion.

Yuzu allows this a few more times before he reminds himself that it is late. He’s got practice in the morning, he can’t get distracted by cat shenanigans. Or Shoma shenanigans. He has a mission: back to back Olympic titles, back to back world titles. He wants, with an intensity that he can barely keep in.

He dislodges the cat and goes to brush his teeth. This time, when the water flows freely, the cat doesn’t hesitate: it jumps onto the counter and under the stream, feet and fur in the water. It laps at the water greedily.

“I guess you were thirsty. I’m sorry I’m so bad at taking care of you,” Yuzu mumbles around his toothbrush. “I am going to find you the best home, I promise.”

The cat looks at him. It’s ears fold back against its head, eyes narrowing. This is an angry cat. Not scared, not even frustrated. The switch from happily playing to steaming anger happens so rapidly, Yuzu doesn’t know what might have caused it.

Against all higher instincts, Yuzu picks the cat up around the belly, dripping wet and spitting mad as it is, and cuddles it close.

“Hey,” Yuzu says, “you know as well as me that that is the best decision.”

He speaks low, soothing, because words won’t really mean much to an animal that is upset. A calm, warm tone of voice will help more than reassuring words, he thinks, so he just keeps talking.

“We’ll find you a lovely home, and you’ll get nice food and an actual cat toilet and maybe a scratching beam, and more toys, maybe even a whole catnip plant instead of the artificial stuff. And you’ll be happy, and I’ll be sad, but it’s okay, because I’m an adult who can deal with my emotions, while you are a cat who cannot. You won’t even miss me,”

The cat hisses again. It winds against Yuzu’s grip, rigid and Yuzu reflexively hold it tighter. The cat splutters, growls, and digs its claws into Yuzu’s skin, bites down on his arm. It’s a shock, the pain and the betrayal and Yuzu can’t keep in the upset noise, but the cat has already run off into the closet.

It sits there, on the highest shelf of the wardrobe, tail swishing and ears still laid back, hissing when Yuzu tries to come closer. “What did I do?” Yuzu asks. There’s blood welling from the scratch on his forearm. He’ll match with Keiji tnow, Yuzu thinks. “What did I say to make you upset?”

The cat doesn’t answer. Yuzu doesn’t know why he expects it to. He sighs. The scratches ache, but there’s something hollow and upset in Yuzu’s chest that hurts more. “Well okay then,” he says, “be like that. I need to sleep.”

When he turns off the lights to go to sleep, alarms set for early in the morning, the cat is still in the closet, hiding from him. Yuzu lies in the darkness, and wonders why this sucks so much.

“I’m really sorry,” he says into the darkness. “I didn’t mean it.”

He dozes off after a while of just staring into nothing, trying to imagine his programs and unable to focus enough to do it. Image training is never this hard, usually the movements, the sound of his blades scraping against the ice come easily to him. Familiar and comforting and, yes, at times frustrating, when Yuzu can’t imagine it just so. He likes the frustration. It drives him.

There’s a dip of the pillow next to his face, just as Yuzu is falling asleep. He smiles.

Maybe that’s already the dream.

“I don’t want you to give up on me,” the cat says from the pillow next to Yuzu’s head, “but what I want doesn’t matter. I’m just a cat. You need to figure out what _you_ want. I don’t think you know what’s good for you.”

“You’re a cat,” Yuzu wants to say, but his voice is gone. “You can’t speak.”

But Yuzu is the one who can’t make a noise.

“Who are you?” The cat asks, with Yuzu’s voice. Yuzu can’t remember who it sounded like before, but now it’s eyes are slanted, lighter, mischievous. “Who do you want to be? What’s your goal, Yuzuru?”

“Shut up,” Yuzu yells, but no words come out. Just a screech, upset and mad and frustrated. Silenced.

Yuzu clutches at his neck. There’s something stuck in his throat that keeps him from speaking. He coughs, coughs and retches and it slips free. He holds a key in his hand.

“Unlock me,” says the cat. “Set me free.”

It doesn’t sound like Yuzuru anymore. It sounds familiar, and when he dares to look at the cat again, it has Shoma’s eyes. It’s unmistakable, that he’s in there. Yuzu fumbles with the key, reaches out because only a touch will suffice, he knows this. It’s magic, it’ll work, Yuzu will get him out. Yuzu will--

He wakes up, sweaty and breathing hard and too warm under his comforter, struggles to push it off him where the fabric sticks to his skin and pins his arms and legs down.

It’s because there’s a body next to him. It’s because there’s a body on top of Yuzu’s duvet that pins it to the mattress and it’s Shoma and he’s very, very naked. Yuzu scrambles out from under the duvet and, in a mad dash, throws the free corner of it over him.

Shoma grumbles, low and soft and grabs at the comforter, rolls himself into it like he was born to do so. Yuzu watches, frozen, from where he’s perched on the floor.

He might wake up.

He might wake up and Yuzu will have to explain what is going on and Yuzu has no idea what’s going on. Yuzu can just see Shoma’s face from where he’s sitting, rough curls hanging into Shoma’s face, his eyelashes throwing dark shadows over his cheeks. There’s light coming in from the windows because Yuzu didn’t close the curtains.

He stays very, very still. Shoma’s breathing evens out, his small unhappy noises at being torn from sleep ceasing. Yuzu sits back, butt on the carpet, and takes a breath. Then another. The next one comes out as a hiccup, the third is a laugh. Yuzu presses both hands to his mouth and laughs, hysterical and too loud, but Shoma is deep asleep, dead to the world.

He’s back, and he’s here, with Yuzu, in the middle of the night, after being gone for an entire day. Another wave of disbelief and shock hits Yuzu, and he laughs harder, heaving with it. It’s silent, mostly, which he is glad for. He’s gone insane.

That’s the only reason: he’s gone batshit because Shoma left, and he hallucinated the entire past day. Except… the cat. Yuzu had the cat. If the cat is still here, he can prove this is a prank. Because the cat wasn’t Shoma, and Shoma didn’t turn into a cat. Shoma hid, and Mihoko and Kikuchi played along, and Yuzu had a real cat.

Only the cat is gone. He looks everywhere, in the grey light of the open window, searches the wardrobe, his laundry, the suitcase, the bathroom, under the bed. The cat is gone. That means Yuzu was right. Yuzu was right and wrong, and he’s absolutely going to go back to Canada and talk to his therapist about how maybe, the stress of competing at the Olympics a second time has gotten to him.

But first he will tell Mihoko to collect Shoma.

He finds himself at her door minutes later with very little recollection of walking there. He knocks. It’s very, very early, but the hallways are lit up, and it’s too bright for Yuzu’s eyes.

“Yuzu?” Mihoko blinks and ties her dressing gown at the waist, “What’s going on?”

“He’s back,” Yuzu stutters out, hands waving. “He’s in my bed. You have to get him.”

“Oh,” Mihoko says. Yuzu nods encouragingly. She nods back at him, eyes narrowing. “Come in, Yuzu. You look shaken.”

“It’s nothing,” Yuzu tells her, voice bright, “I’ve lost my grip on reality, but that’s okay!”

“How so?”

“I hallucinated the cat. Or maybe Shoma was a cat? I’m not sure, but Shoma is in my bed and my cat is gone, and the only conclusion I can come to is that the cat was Shoma all along, because they existed and did not exist for the same amount of time in my life and saying this out loud sounds just... Wrong.”

“Yes,” Mihoko says, and smiles brightly. “But it is factually correct.”

“What.” Yuzu says.

“What?” Mihoko answers, with another one of those smiles. The mysterious ones that mean she is dangling an answer in front of Yuzu that he can’t grasp, that she knows all of his questions and won’t solve a single one.

“You knew?”

“When you brought him with you, yesterday,” she says, “yes.”

“My trainer knew?” Yuzu says, betrayal even more obvious now than it had been before.

Mihoko nods, slower. “After I brought the possibility up, he checked, too. We discussed the possibility of breaking him out of that form, but it’s not healthy. It’s better to wait out the natural course of such a thing.”

“Natural.” Yuzu repeats. “Your student disappeared for a whole day and night because he turned into a cat, before a very important competition, and you say that’s... natural?”

Mihoko shrugs, pulls her bathrobe tighter around herself. “Shoma is… special. These types of things tend to happen to him, though it hasn’t happened to this degree. This was rather unusual, he’s never turned into an animal before. A tree, yes, one time he turned into a sunflower for a few days. But never something… mobile.”

“You are kidding,” Yuzu says, “this is some kind of extremely elaborate prank.”

“No,” Mihoko says, “I promise you, Shoma was very much the cat you were taking care of, and he is very much going to wake up in a few minutes and realise that you left him on his own.”

She gets up. “You wanted me to collect him, so I will. You can stay here until I’m back, I’ll just bring him to his room.”

Yuzu sits absolutely still for a moment, because if he doesn’t move, this won’t be real. It can’t be. But the puzzle pieces fit together. And Yuzu believes in transformation, he believes in power, he believes in Abe no Seimei, after all. Why would Shoma be different.

The scratch on his arm where the cat, no, where Shoma had dug his claws in is raised and red. He didn’t hallucinate that. It makes more sense now, and no sense at all: Shoma behaved like a cat the entire time. There were no signs he wasn’t a cat, except for rare, strange glimpses of likeness.

Yuzu held him. Yuzu pet him and comforted him and accidentally gave him catnip and forgot to feed him and he was going to give Shoma away to some Italian stranger. No wonder Shoma scratched him. Yuzu is terrible at taking care of him.

Mihoko sends Yuzu back to bed. “It’s too much, isn’t it?” She presses his cardkey into his palm, and places a hand on his back. “Sleep, Yuzu. Things will be much clearer in the morning.”

But it is already morning, and when Yuzu sits on the corner of his bed, all he can think of is Shoma, bundled up in his duvet, and the dreams he’s had, both the comforting one, and the bizarre. He doesn’t know what to make of it. He falls asleep thinking, mind turning in circles around the impossibility of it all.

When he wakes up, he has overslept his alarm, which means he’s late to the bus, which means he is late to practice. Yuzu is never late to practice. Brian shakes his head at him, but Tracy gives Yuzu a reassuring squeeze on the arm  that makes him wince and sends him to the warm-up area with firm instructions to stretch properly and take care of his ankle specifically.

Yuzu does. Yuzu focuses, and he does his stretches and he goes through the movements to loosen up his joints and he does not think about Shoma at all.

He doesn’t expect Keiji in front of him when Yuzu gets up, but he is greeted with crescent eyes and a chuckle. “How is your demon cat, Yuzu. I see it got you, too?”

The scratch ends just above Yuzu’s wrist. He’d thought the shirt would cover it, but it rode up and revealed an inch or so of red, sore skin. “Yeah,” Yuzu says, “I upset him.”

“Do you know what to do with it yet?”

Yuzu shrugs. “It’s ...taken care of.”

He watches Keiji itch at the scratches on his bicep. They have healed over quite quickly, brown and peeling already, revealing the new skin beneath.

Behind them, there’s a small intake of breath. Then Shoma steps closer. He looks at Keiji, eyes wide and determined, but he bows to them both. “I’m sorry for making you worry,” he says, in one big rush. “I fell asleep on the train while sightseeing and ended up on the other end of Italy.”

His eyes flicker to Yuzu. Yuzu doesn’t know what his face is doing, but the disbelief must be written there in big, bold letters. Maybe some disappointment, too. Frustration, anger, upset. There are too many feelings simultaneously for Yuzu to isolate, and Shoma looks away, flushing and uncomfortable, before Yuzu can try.

“I’m really sorry for—” Shoma interrupts himself, as if he’s choking on the words, and then he pokes at Keiji’s arm, and runs off, back to Mihoko’s side. Keiji bursts out laughing.

“I don’t believe him,” he gasps. Yuzu nods. It was quite obviously a lie. Yuzu would have spotted that even if he hadn’t _known_ . “To go sightseeing without me! Here I try to drag him outside to have some fun and see the world and he doesn’t want to. And then he disappears on his own. For almost _two days_!!” Keiji ends his tirade with a shrug. “He’s so weird. He’s a good kid, but sometimes I do wonder about him…”

Yuzu nods again, at a loss for words. Of all the things to be upset about, Keiji chooses that. He’s a good friend. Yuzu wants to tell him, but he can’t do it. It would sound crazy, for one. But it would hurt Shoma. Yuzu doesn’t want to hurt Shoma.

“Yeah,” Yuzu agrees, “I bet he was gaming on his phone and forgot where to get off the train because he got too invested.”

Keiji laughs, nods. “That sounds more like him than _sightseeing_ does.”

They finish their warm-up. If Keiji notices Yuzu watching Shoma out of the corner of his eyes, he doesn’t mention it. Shoma stretches like a cat, limbs impossibly long for his small frame, back bending into a high curve when he hollows his spine. There’s grace to him, Yuzu knows that. Yuzu has known that, and should have recognized it.

But something is different, too. Shoma avoids Mihoko’s touch, tiptoes along the walls with his back to them. Yuzu could swear that he hears him hiss when one of the event organizers comes too close, trying to usher them onto the ice.

Shoma bites his lip, shakes his head until his hair falls into his eyes. With his skates on, he looks just like the Shoma Yuzu knew before the cat disaster.

Then Brian beckons Yuzu over, and he can’t look out for Shoma anymore. Tracy proposes stroking exercises to warm him up some more, Brian wants to try the salchow again, and Yuzu wants both. Everything.

He comes off the ice shiny with sweat and exhausted. But he feels prepared. His ankle twinges, aches when Yuzu unties his boots, but it’s bearable.

Shoma ran off the ice as if it were on fire, and is currently hiding in a corner, watching the people around him wide-eyed. He looks as frightened and overwhelmed as he did when he was a kitten being chased by teenage girls. It’s easy to empathize with that. Again.

Yuzu doesn’t expect Shoma to move towards him when he walks in his direction. Neither did Shoma, judging from the surprised look on his face. But it’d be too awkward for him to stop, so Yuzu does. Shoma takes a few more hesitant steps towards him. He looks like he wants to come even closer. It’s strange.

“Is everything okay?” Yuzu asks him. He thinks he manages to sound friendly, but Shoma winces at his tone.

“Yes,” he says, “I… it’s always worst on the first day back. Everything is brighter and louder and I’m still… kind of the other thing.”

“Oh,” Yuzu says. Shoma fiddles with the sleeves of his shirt, too long on him and hanging over his hands. They are curled into fists around the fabric, Yuzu can tell even though they are hidden, from the tension Shoma carries high in his shoulders. He places a hand there.

Shoma melts into it, going pliant and pressing against it simultaneously, eyes sliding shut. If he could, Yuzu thinks, he’d purr now. But that would be very, very weird.

He doesn’t realise he said that out loud.

Shoma throws him a betrayed glance, and twists away from his hand. Yuzu knows that look. That is “giving you away” conversation anger. He takes a step back. Shoma turns, arms wrapping around himself, and walks away as quickly as he can.

He avoids Yuzu for the rest of the day. The next morning, Shoma looks fluffier than ever, still wild-eyed and oversensitive. Even Keiji, who seems too even-keeled to really worry about everyone’s moods, notices.

Yuzu watches them talk. Keiji sits down on the single available chair as they speak, nodding, expression serious, as Shoma talks. He looks hesitant, but then Keiji cracks some kind of stupid joke, and Shoma grins, big and goofy and something that Yuzu has missed terribly.

It’s not even directed at him, it shouldn’t make Yuzu’s chest clench like that.

Keiji laughs, pulls Shoma down next to him. Shoma, out of clumsiness or some other inexplicable reason, doesn’t sit on the tiny sliver of chair next to him, but smack-dab on his lap. Yuzu’s chest clenches tighter. He swallows. Keiji laughs, loud and rampageous.

“Like good old times,” he tells Yuzu, when he’s stepped close enough. “When we were in juniors Shoma would sit on my lap all the time. He got embarrassed when we got to seniors. My lap wasn’t good enough for him anymore.”

He says it mournfully, teasing, like that’s not weird. It’s probably not weird. Yuzu wouldn’t have known, Yuzu hasn’t sat on a lap in his life, except for his parents, and his sister, maybe. Yuzu might have done if he had had friends like this: Shoma looks quite happy on Keiji’s lap. He’s usually easily embarrassed, but he looks perfectly content perched against Keiji’s chest with Keiji’s chin on his shoulder.

The only thing missing would be a belly rub, Yuzu thinks, and this would be Shoma as a cat all over again. It should be more awkward now that he’s human again, but instead it’s sweet. Shoma doesn’t touch people much. He never initiated hugs unless it’s with Mihoko, he barely ever reaches out. Usually Yuzu has to grab him around the waist and pull him close.

The feeling in Yuzu’s chest spreads. It feels ugly, to want Shoma not to have this kind of easy-going friendship. Especially when Keiji rocks him and teases, and Shoma laughs and elbows him in the ribs and they play-fight.

Yuzu leaves them to it.

He doesn’t expect the knock at his door, later that night.

He doesn’t expect Shoma of the other side of it, shifting his body weight from foot to foot restlessly when Yuzu glances through the little spyhole. He stops when Yuzu opens the door, but there’s a restless energy about him.

“Hi?” Yuzu says.

“Sorry,” Shoma replies, and steps back. Yuzu shapes his confusion into a smile. It doesn’t make Shoma step closer, but at least he speaks again. “I… came to apologize?”

He glances off to the side, up and down the hallway as if expecting someone to come out any second. There’s something off about that, about him. This is not how he usually moves. Yes, he fidgets but not like this, not so obviously. With Yuzu, he often just moves outright, gesturing, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet. He’s not as... shifty.

Shoma brushes his hair out of his face and blinks up at Yuzu. Yuzu reminds himself that Shoma probably expects him to react. Probably in the way Yuzu would normally react, but it’s difficult to think of normalcy when Yuzu’s world is turning upside down.

He doesn’t want to be caught out on the hallway, though. People will talk, because people like talking. He motions Shoma in, opening the door a little wider and stepping aside, back to the door. Shoma blinks at him, and then walks in. He steps closer than Yuzu thought he might, shoulder brushing against Yuzu’s chest. Yuzu closes the door, and watches Shoma look around.

“You know your way around, I assume,” he offers, “so just… sit anywhere.”

Shoma nods and perches on the corner of the bed like he doesn’t want to intrude or invite any more invitations. It’s cute, the way he curls up a little, elbows on his thighs, head bowed, peering up at Yuzu.

“So…” Shoma starts, “this is… really awkward. I’m really sorry that I slept in your bed and that you had to take care of me. I scratched—”

“Uh,” Yuzu interrupts. “what.”

“I made a mess of your time,” Shoma says, “I’m really sorry,”

“You were a cat,” Yuzu insists, shaking his head. He moves into the room now, because Shoma is looking at the floor and it’s not helpful. “Sorry, I’m very much still trying to comprehend that you turn from a normal human man into.. things. Apparently a variety of things. I… It’s nice of you to apologize, consider that accepted, but Shoma. WHAT?”

Yuzu had taken a few more steps than intended and it lead him to stand right in front of Shoma, and so he does what seems simplest: he just squats down to be of his height, gripping the bed by Shoma’s thigh for balance. Shoma looks up when the bed shifts, blinks at him.

This close, his eyes are a dark, warm amber. Yuzu can see he was right: Shoma in cat form kept his eyes, big and round and astonished. This close, Yuzu can also see the way Shoma’s lips part as he breathes in, the blush collecting in his cheeks as he licks his lips, preparing to speak.

“Sorry,” Shoma whispers. He shifts around, clearly uncomfortable, until his leg is pressed along Yuzu’s arm, which is when he stills, with a look like he’s caught in headlights. “Sorry.”

It’s not exactly what Yuzu wants to hear, and he sighs. He wants explanations, not apologies, but he’s honestly not sure if Shoma has any. Mihoko certainly didn’t offer any information, so.

“Does it happen a lot?” Yuzu asks, the first of a barrage of questions he has about this. He deserves to know, he thinks. Maybe. He’ll find out: if Shoma answers, he probably agrees.

Shoma blinks, eyes shifting to the right as he thinks. “What would you consider ‘a lot’?”

Yuzu shrugs. “Every few weeks?”

Shoma’s head tilts, but he smiles, hesitantly. Yuzu smiles back. He sinks to his knees, because that’s more comfortable. It means he sits a little lower, but that’s okay. He sighs again, but this time it’s because the muscles in his thighs and calves stretch. The carpet is only slightly scratchy when Yuzu sinks his left hand into it. The right stays on the bed, next to Shoma’s knee.

“It’s not that often,” Shoma replies. “Not a full… change. I can usually control it a little bit, but sometimes it’s like… it just happens without me doing anything.”

That answers another one of Yuzu’s questions, if not fully. “You control it? So… this is something you do consciously?”

Shoma shakes his head, then stops and then shakes it again. Yuzu laughs at him, and Shoma cracks a hesitant grin.

“No,” he says, “and yes?” At Yuzu’s disbelieving and unimpressed huff, Shoma shrugs. “It’s hard to explain. I can do some things, small things, when I focus. But it’s not… it’s not really a matter of intent? Mihoko thinks that it is my state of mind that is important, how I feel and what I feel _like_.”

“So… for the past few days you felt like a cat?” Yuzu hypothesizes. “And before that… you felt like... a tree?”

Shoma huffs a laugh and leans forward, hands burying in his hair. It looks a little scruffy, now that he’s not a kitten anymore. Yuzu wonders if it would be soft if he touched it. If Shoma would like it, Yuzu digging his fingers in and scratching gently. It’s an odd thought, and he’s glad Shoma continues before Yuzu can choose to do anything about it. But it’s not odder than any other thoughts Yuzu’s had recently. Or than any of the things that have happened.

“It’s not so literal,” Shoma begins, “It’s more... a general... mood? Like… I’ll feel tired and like I want to just… be alone and resting and to be something... stable and growing, and it’s a mood that reoccurs, and if I feel it strongly enough, I’ll become… a tree.”

He blushes, again, and Yuzu watches the color spread across his face in fascination. It hits his nose, collects in the bottom of his cheeks. He can’t imagine what a Shoma-tree would look like.

“What kind of tree?”

“Oh,” Shoma blinks, “most often I’m a willow.”

“Do you come with a pot?” Yuzu jokes.

Shoma stares at him, and then he shakes his head.

“I move outside before, because it’s where I’m drawn,” he says, “my mother… she likes them, so I stand by the small ones that grow in the backyard.”

It’s so like him, to find a form that would please a person he loves. It makes Yuzu feel bad about cracking the joke. “How did you feel before you turned into a cat?” Yuzu asks, as a distraction, to make it better.

He’d like to know how Shoma’s family feels about him turning into a tree every now and then, but it doesn’t seem like a sensitive question to ask. Maybe Shoma will tell him in time. Maybe never. Yuzu knows he’s still confused, still a little bit doubtful, like Shoma will crack a big, confident, trolling grin in a few seconds and laugh at Yuzu for falling for this.

“I still kind of don’t believe it,” Yuzu continues, when Shoma doesn’t answer immediately. “It’s too surreal, like you’re some kind of ancient forest spirit or something.”

“Yeah,” Shoma says, “I know. I’m not, though. I know it’s.. weird. I’m sorry I’ve made everything so weird. But… I can show you. I can show you the small things I can do when I focus?”

“You… can?”

Shoma nods, and then he leans forward, and he takes both of Yuzu’s hands in his. It’s unexpected, absolutely surprising, and Shoma’s hands are very warm. He’s smaller than Yuzu, but Shoma’s hands are as broad as his, fingers a little shorter to make up for it. Yuzu carefully curls his fingers around Shoma’s and holds on.

“Look,” Shoma says, and closes his eyes. He bites at his lip. Yuzu can’t see a difference to him, not really, until there’s a breeze from the window and he smells freshly mown grass and something sweeter, like a pond in the summer. When he looks up, there are flowers in Shoma’s hair, white and just a tiny bit of pink and purple around the edges of them, curling around his forehead and ears, and the longer Yuzu watches them, the more he realises that the rest of Shoma’s hair is turning into petals as well: orange and brown and black strands turning a dark, wooden colour before they become green and then white, unfurling in a reverse process of growth, or maybe it is sped up.

“You’re so…” Yuzu breathes, Shoma smiles, sweet and pleased and a little self-satisfied and lets go of Yuzu, and Yuzu reaches up. But in that moment, the half-second between one breath and the next, as Yuzu’s fingers brush his forehead and Shoma’s concentration slips, the flowers shift back. Yuzu’s fingers touch hair that feels like hair: soft and dense and fluffy.

“Oh,” Yuzu breathes, and Shoma blinks open his eyes. Yuzu didn’t mean to sound disappointed, but Shoma’s face falls. “I can try again,” he reassures him and squeezes his eyes shut again, but Yuzu doesn’t want that, either. He just witnessed something special. There’s nothing more Yuzu could want.

“No, it’s ok,” Yuzu tells him, and ruffles Shoma’s hair, “that was lovely. Beautiful.”

“Do you believe it now?”

“Yes,” Yuzu says, and then, because Shoma looks away from him again, blush staining his cheeks like it will stay there forever. “You were a very cute cat, too, by the way.”

He doesn’t mean to tease, but Shoma, if possible, blushes harder. It makes Yuzu smile grow beside himself, and he wonders if he looks as flustered as he thinks he does, but... It’s okay. He leans back, sits back onto his heels again.

“I should apologise, too,” he offers, “I was a terrible at taking care of you when you were a cat.”

Shoma looks like he wants to protest, wide eyes and lips parting, but Yuzu continues on. “I didn’t think to feed you! Or give you water! And I had no toys and I scolded you for pooping in the shower.”

“I pooped in the shower?” Shoma asks, mortified. “I’m so sorry.”

“You were a cat,” Yuzu laughs. The statement will never lose its novelty, he’s sure. Shoma is clutching at his face, grimacing vividly. It’s a good look on him. “There was really nothing else you might have done.”

“Eughh,” Shoma moans. Yuzu laughs at him, because Shoma’s exasperation is mostly for show. But it’s… there’s something he needs to know. Because Shoma has been holding back, has been showing Yuzu only those secrets that weren’t related to their cohabitation. He knows the general scope of Shoma’s abilities, knows why he shifts sometimes. But…

“Hey,” Yuzu wonders out loud, “when you’re turned into something else. Do you… stay you?”

Shoma blinks out between his hands. “What do you mean?”

“How much do you understand? When you’re a cat, for example?”

“Oh! I… don’t know. It’s not… understanding or not. I’m… very much the thing I’ve turned to, with all it’s… processes and instincts? But I’m also… me, somewhere behind that. It’s like I’m sort of… sleepwalking, I remember things roughly, but no details. Just… impressions? Does that make sense?”

Yuzu nods, thinking. Sleepwalking is a good metaphor, probably.

“So what do you remember from being a cat?” He asks, just to make sure. Yuzu said… some things. He’s not sure if Shoma knows that he knows them. He’s not sure he wants to remind Shoma of them if he does know them, and if he doesn’t know them, Yuzu doesn’t want him to find out.

“Being scared, mostly. At first. I remember running to Keiji, and I remember I hurt him. I remember you picking me up, and talking to me, but I don’t know what you said, just that I felt… safe. I remember sleeping, and playing. There’s… things that are hazy after a girl brought a mouse over. The mouse was very fun.”

Yuzu blinks. Girl? ….Mouse.

“Oh no,” Yuzu says, and sits up again. Shoma startles when Yuzu grips his knees and shakes them, but he laughs instead of pulling away. “I gave you catnip.”

“What?”

Yuzu shakes him harder, hard enough to make Shoma’s upper body move with it, too. His teeth clack together. “I gave you drugs. I gave cat-you drugs and I didn’t even consider! What if you can’t skate? What if it’s doping, what if I accidentally doped you?”

Shoma blinks. Then he takes Yuzu’s face between his hands in a move that is…very suave and very unexpected and probably something Shoma learned from Javi. Shoma smiles at him, a sweet, reassuring smile that turns into a big, shiteating grin. Yuzu’s stomach drops.

“Yuzu….” Shoma says, “that was the best trip of my life.”

Yuzu stares at him. His face feels very warm between the palms of Shoma’s hands, and it is very nice and very calming to be held. He shakes Shoma’s knees for posterity. “But what if?”

Shoma shakes his head at him, and he’s laughing at Yuzu. Yuzu drugged him when he was a cat, which is a trip of a sentence in the first place, and Shoma is laughing about that.

“It’s catnip,” Shoma reassures him, patting Yuzu’s cheeks a little awkwardly, “if it shows up in any tests, it’ll show up as catnip. I very much doubt that it is a regulated substance.”

“Yes,” Yuzu says and shifts back onto his heels. Shoma lets go of his head. “That’s true. Okay, good.”

Yuzu doesn’t find it as difficult as he thought he might, to incorporate Shoma the cat with Shoma the person, considering that Shoma as a cat very much experiences the world as a cat would have. So it probably wasn’t so weird for Yuzu to have held him, and scratches his belly.

Probably.

Yuzu isn’t exactly going to ask. But he does need to know, needs the reassurance that Shoma doesn’t…

“Do you remember me talking to you? Like… the words?”

Shoma shifts, a little, nailed to the spot like that. And Yuzu realises that Shoma has been… quite diplomatically not telling Yuzu exactly this. Even if he remembers his experience mostly in impressions, those impressions must be quite revealing.

“I…” Shoma starts, and hesitates visibly. Yuzu smiles at him, finds himself wanting to reach out and pat at his knee or shoulder to reassure him. It’s not a cat-impulse, this is… just a Shoma-impulse, Yuzu thinks. He’s done this before Shoma turned into a cat. Just because he was able to do it more when Shoma was a cat doesn’t mean it wasn’t there before. It just went unchecked. Right now, Yuzu doesn’t think Shoma the human would appreciate being petted.

“I remember some things?” Shoma continues, slowly. He looks like he’s trying to think of a way to say this gently. Or, not to say it at all. Yuzu pats his knee after all. Shoma blinks at him, and then smiles, a little, shy around the corners.

So maybe Yuzu was wrong, and Shoma appreciates that kind of thing, no matter what form he resides in at any given time. Interesting.

“I remember… and it’s one of the clearer memories, because they tend to be… more secure if I’ve been in a form for a while, like my consciousness is… arriving? With time?” Yuzu nods because that makes sense to him, and Shoma continues. “I remember you wanted to give me away. I remember not liking it, because you weren’t saying it as a joke. You meant it?”

He sounds pained, like he doesn’t want to reveal that it ached. “I scratched you,” Shoma says, and taps Yuzu’s arm like he did Keiji’s earlier. “I got so scared and so angry and I hurt you.”

“I wanted to keep you.”

Shoma slides off the bed so they’re on a level and sitting closer, almost knee to knee. Yuzu watches as he, slowly, as if waiting for permission or reprimand, reaches out to touch the part of Yuzu’s arm where the scratch it. Shoma peels his sleeve up, hisses. The scratch has scabbed over, but the skin is pink around it.

“It’ll heal,” Yuzu says, and laughs. “Keiji’s is already almost gone.”

Shoma looks at him, and Yuzu almost can’t stand it, between his fingers on Yuzu’s skin and the look of him, it’s…

“I asked Javi for help,” Yuzu continues lightly. “I asked Alina for help, too.”

Shoma barely cracks a smile. He’s still holding Yuzu’s wrist, and Yuzu gets the sense that he’s focusing, that he’s somewhere else entirely. It makes Yuzu want to be quiet under his observation. Shoma looks at him, eyes wandering from Yuzu’s eyes to his lips to his shoulders, to the scratch, and Yuzu feels himself relax like this is some kind of mindfulness exercise, feels his breathing grow slow and steady and his shoulders sink.

They sit in silence for a while. Yuzu isn’t sure of the time, loses track of it, focused on Shoma and the warmth of his hand, on his breathing and, idly, in the back of his mind, reminding himself that this is weird, and that he should be focusing on the competition.

“I’m glad you know,” Shoma says. “I’m glad it’s not… I’m glad you know.”

He looks away as he says it, like it is something he doesn’t like to admit or like he’s flustered by it, like it is a confession of a sort. And Yuzu doesn’t want to read into it, but Shoma is holding his hand, and when he was a cat, Yuzu was the one to give him comfort and it feels like this is comfort, too.

Like Yuzu can take care of him, in a little way that Shoma needs, and like Yuzu has done it without asking, which is the way such support should be offered.

“Thank you for… telling me,” Yuzu says, lamely, in lack for a way to express how he feels. Shoma nods, and lets go of him. “We should go to sleep,” Yuzu continues.

“Yes,” Shoma says, and picks himself up from the floor. He pulls Yuzu up as well, smiles and wanders off, leaving Yuzu to idle around his room, a little restless and still wondering at it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prayer circle for Shoma's boots.


	4. kitty cat, kitty cat, be on your way

Magic doesn’t become real, from one second to the next. It has always been there.

It has always been there, and Yuzu has been on the other side of it, trying to grasp at concepts and ideas just out of his reach. It stings, that Shoma is naturally a part of that, part of something larger than himself, able to shift and turn and think about something that is utterly inaccessible to Yuzuru. Shoma can turn his hair into petals, and Yuzu struggles lifting off the ground.

It feels unfair. It’s not a good feeling, because he knows, he _knows_ that Shoma’s experience probably hasn’t been pleasant all along. Shoma is the kind to downplay his experiences, and Yuzu has seen, has felt, his terror, the lack of control that his shifts cause. He can’t imagine spending a second in any other form but his own body.

Besides, Shoma falls. Shoma falls often and hard and he never complains. Yuzu shouldn’t complain, either. Not even in his head. He should be thankful that Shoma sat with him, that Shoma trusted him with what is undoubtedly one of his biggest secrets. Yuzu sighs.

He sits on the edge of the bed, stares down at his hands. These hands have touched something that made Yuzu think he was going mad just hours earlier. He knows it’s real, now. He touches his fingers to his cheeks where Shoma’s hands had been, and smiles.

He’s glad Shoma shared this with him, because otherwise Yuzu might be feeling even more lost and out of the loop than he does right now. There are just so many questions Yuzu hasn’t even thought of yet.

His phone interrupts him by vibrating where he left it on the bedside table. It’s a message from Shoma, one he must have sent before reaching his room.

“Go to sleep, Yuzu.”

“Go to sleep yourself,” he replies. “We have a long day tomorrow.”

When Shoma doesn’t reply after a few moments,Yuzu goes to brush his teeth and wash his face. It’s late, and he does need to sleep if he wants to be capable of performing tomorrow. His focus has slipped quite a bit: usually Yuzu wouldn’t have sat on his floor talking, distracted, for an hour or two before a big competition like this.

He cuddles into his pillow, pulls his blankets over himself, and closes his eyes. Maybe he’s allowed a little bit of leeway: this season has been hell on his body, and he’s pushing himself further than he should, competing here. It’s necessary, and he’s largely fine.

Laying there, his nightly routine kicks in, and before he knows it, he’s going through his short program in his head, reverse choreography just to challenge himself before considering the actual program. He thinks about his body in opening position still and relaxed, the first notes of Ballade begin to play in his head. He doesn’t get much further before dropping off.

He knows he is dreaming when he opens his eyes to a sea of green and gold and blindingly bright blue, and it takes a moment and a lot of blinking for him to recognize the colours as shapes, as leaves bathed in sunlight. His body feels heavy against the warm ground. There’s birdsong, chirping, and if Yuzu were to shift his head... yes. There’s the squirrel.

“I didn’t think I’d dream like this again,” Yuzu says to it, idly. It is friendly, Yuzu knows because he feeds it sometimes.

“I know,” the squirrel replies. Yuzu blinks at it. The squirrel blinks back. “What? Did you think I wouldn’t talk to you anymore?”

It’s quick, a blur of some sort, before the squirrel has shifted into something more cat-like. It doesn’t look like Shoma did, not really, although the dark fluffy fur and the general shape are right.

“But I unlocked you,” Yuzu says. “Shoma is himself again, that’s what the dream was about.”

“Was it?” the cat says, voice a down to a whisper. “Are you sure that’s what we were talking about?”

“You...” Yuzu thinks, sits up and looks closer. The cat preens, a little, under his attention, rolling onto its side and offering its belly for scritches. “You’re not Shoma?”

If a cat would snort, the noise it makes would be categorized as such. “Correct.”

“So when you told me to unlock you?”

“We weren’t talking about Shoma at all.”

“Then what were we talking about?” Yuzu asks, frustrated. The cryptic messages, the whole lucid dreaming trip, it all started when magic entered Yuzu’s life. It should stop now that the magic has left, except.

But Shoma has been magic all along, and Yuzu has known him for years. But Shoma feels like the catalyst, like with his shift, with Yuzu’s awareness of the strange and unusual, something opened up in him.

“You’re not magic. If you’re not magic, what are you?”

The cat grins.

Yuzu wakes up in cold sweat. There’s a draft because he left the window open a gap. He shivers. He wasn’t cold when the cat was in his bed. He wasn’t cold when a newly shifted Shoma was wrapped up in his duvet, either. He misses the cat more because Shoma was a bit of a shock. But at the moment he’d like for someone to be here, animal shaped or not.

He wraps up tighter in his duvet and tries to ignore the draft, so he can convince himself to stay horizontal. It doesn’t work, Yuzu drifts in and out of sleep, paranoid that he’ll dream again, aware of how lonely he feels in the dark.

When he finally checks his phone it’s too late to go back to sleep. Yuzu digs himself out of the blankets and goes to close the window, shivering and covered in goosebumps. He feels weary, too worn out to compete, but he’ll have to. The dream kept him from resting, like his mind didn’t shut off all the way.

He goes to shower, gets dressed. The dream occupies his thoughts all the while. If Yuzu wasn’t meant to unlock Shoma’s human form, then why did the key work. Perhaps it didn’t. It’s difficult to tell whether something is magic or just random brain farts. It’s difficult to tell whether something is magic or if Yuzu is losing it after all, in a different way than he’d initially thought.

He eats a powerbar and drinks his nutrition shake and the cat’s voice still echoes in his head. Yuzu puts in earphones, plays his music as loud as possible to drown it out. He doesn’t have time for this.

Shoma arrives at practice at the same time Yuzu does. He looks as exhausted as Yuzu feels, hands wrapped around a coffee cup the size of his head. When he sees Yuzu, the ghost of a smile appears on his face. Yuzu takes his headphones out. Keiji takes one look at them both and shakes his head. “What did you guys do last night? Video game marathon without me?”

Shoma’s head snaps up. “Never!”

The tone of him makes Keiji crack up, and Yuzu feels himself smile in response as well. “I didn’t sleep well. Weird dreams,” he offers, pacifying.

Shoma nods. “I couldn’t fall asleep. Too... tense.”

“Yeah,” Keiji says. “I didn’t rest well either, but my eye bags don’t reach my knees.”

Shoma waves his coffee in front of Keiji’s face like it’s the solution to all of his problems. “I have this. It will fix everything.”

Yuzu shakes his head at them. He catches Tracy looking for him, so he waves them off and goes to join his coaching team. Kikuchi, as usual, stands to the side, watching intently. It’s reassuring, usually, but now Yuzu wonders what he’s thinking. What he knows.

“I had a strange dream last night,” Yuzu tells him, when Kikuchi is helping him stretch, supervising Yuzu as he warms up. Kikuchi nods. “It’s... it wasn’t the first dream of its kind, but the previous one... I thought I knew what it was about? I don’t know what this one’s about.”

Kikuchi listens, as intently as he concentrates on all other things, and when Yuzu ends, he smiles. “Yuzu,” he says, “dreams aren’t magic, usually.”

“But people have prophetic dreams!”

“Yes,” Kikuchi agrees, “and those aren’t personal. Your dream... it sounds very personal. I think you’re going to have to do some soul searching, because I cannot help you interpret that.”

Yuzu sighs, frustrated. Kikuchi laughs at him. “Do you think your little friend has something to do with it?” he asks, after a moment of studying Yuzu’s expression. He nods over to Shoma, who has accumulated an army of caffeinated drinks around his yoga mat. It’s no wonder he’s always jittery; there’s no way that much energy fits into a frame so small.

“I guess,” Yuzu says, and stretches his hand up. Kikuchi takes it, and pulls him to his feet. If Yuzu leans his full weight into it to make his trainer work for it a little, nobody but them will know. Kikuchi huffs out a fond laugh at Yuzu’s antics and sends him off to Brian.

They get a 45 minute practice slot to prepare for the competition. It’s ongoing, the earliest groups have already begun when Yuzu sets foot onto the practice rink. He takes a moment, after nodding his okay to Brian and Tracy, to just stroke, balance, get a feel for the ice again.

He never really loses it, but sometimes it feels necessary to remind himself of what he’s here to do. He’s going to perform his best. Shoma crosses Yuzu’s line of sight, and Yuzu unwittingly drifts after him. He wants to remind himself to focus, wants to reprimand himself, but Shoma looks so tense and tired that Yuzu acts before thinking.

He’s next to him before he can tell himself that it’s a stupid thing to do, tugging on the tab that is sticking out of the back of Shoma’s shirt, tucking it into his shirt. Yuzu’s fingers are met with warm skin and Shoma’s shoulders draw together around his ears. He turns, eyes wide and mouth shaped around surprised exclamation. He relaxes when he sees that it’s just Yuzu.

“Hey?”

“Will you be okay later?” Yuzu asks. “There’s always withdrawing, if you’re still exhausted from…”

Shoma shakes his head, eyebrows rising in surprise. “No, I’m fine. Are... you?”

They’re close, close enough that Yuzu’s side is touching Shoma’s all along their bodies, and it’s easy to whisper. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

Shoma smiles up at him through his eyelashes, sweet and secretive, and Yuzu finds himself pressing closer, feels Shoma slumping against him so they’re holding each other up like cards stacked together. It feels good, warmth seeping into Yuzu’s body where it isn’t exposed to the air.

Shoma sighs, and turns his head so he’s leaning his forehead against Yuzu’s shoulder. It’s cute, because it’s Shoma and he’s tired and trusting, but it’s not a Shoma-like gesture. It’s like there’s a remnant of the cat still in him that wants to rub against Yuzu’s leg and be petted.

He should break this up and return to practice full focus. He came over just to check on Shoma, see that he’s in a good enough condition to compete, but now it’s difficult to skate away. Yuzu ruffles Shoma’s hair, and Shoma smiles wider, nuzzles closer and oh. If they were anywhere else in the world, Yuzu would want to stay close like this forever.

But Brian is glaring daggers, trying to catch Yuzu’s attention, and yes it’s true that there are photographers and that this embrace will be splattered over every newspaper tomorrow unless Yuzu does something to distract them.

Shoma must feel him stiffen at the thought because he pulls away, blinking and suddenly embarrassed. “Oh,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t.”

Yuzu wants to tell him it’s fine, that he’s allowed, that he doesn’t mind and that he’s welcome to make a home of Yuzu’s shoulder at any time, but he can’t. Instead he smiles, ruffles Shoma’s hair playfully, and skates off in Brian’s direction.

He sets up a triple axel on the way even though he hasn’t warmed to the ice nearly enough. It might be distraction enough. Next time he checks, when everyone is leaving the ice, Shoma is nowhere to be seen.

Yuzu doesn’t spot him in the warm-up area at the main rink, or as they queue for the six minute warm-up, and then Yuzu has to focus on himself. He sees Shoma like a blur at the edge of his vision, something he can’t focus on but that draws his attention. When they get off the ice afterwards, Shoma comes up to him.

“Uhm,” he murmurs, and then he has both arms wrapped around Yuzu’s waist like a vice, holding on for a moment that passes much too quickly, “good luck, please do your best.”

Shoma disentangles himself and heads off to his coach before Yuzu can breathe, before he can reply, before he can even think. Yuzu’s face has gone slack with surprise and red. Kikuchi, waiting with Yuzu’s stuff, ready to go through their routine, looks carefully blank when Yuzu turns to him with this dumbfounded expression on his face. But Yuzu knows him well enough to recognise his amusement by the twinkle in his eye. He won’t admit it, but he thinks this is hilarious.

It takes Yuzu’s mind off the short program, eases his worry that he hasn’t practised enough, that he is spent and overexerted, after the Olympics, and won’t compete at the level necessary to achieve a good result. Instead, Yuzu takes to the ice with his mind clear. He’s going to do his best, as he was asked. He doesn’t know if everyone else splattered or broke records, and he has nothing left to prove.

Chopin fits like a glove, like a second skin, like Yuzu could skate it blind and on shaking ice. It’s a program so familiar and well-worn that it feels like home. It is magic of its own sort. Yuzu leaves the ice beaming.

There’s interviews, and the small worry in the back of his head about Shoma, who must have fallen to lose the small medal.

“He’s in fifth,” Brian tells Yuzu, after he asks. “He looked a little out of it.”

Keiji popped, too, landing him just out of the top ten, so Yuzu texts him a gif of a giraffe to cheer him up. He doesn’t think a text will be enough to cheer Shoma up. He was gone by the time Yuzu was allowed to leave the rink, and Yuzu is exhausted when he gets back to the hotel room. He forgoes food in favour of sleep. It may mess with his circadian rhythm, but Yuzu doesn’t care.

At least he thinks so, but sleep won’t come. Yuzu lies still for fifteen minutes, too exhausted to think or to rest. The blankets are too light, and his pulse too loud and everything is too much and he wants… something. He picks up his phone, intent on rewatching today’s performance.

Instead, he pulls up the chat app. He replies to Javi, sends an emoji he isn’t quite certain he uses right to the group chat, and then he pulls up Shoma’s chat window.

“Are you okay?”

The reply comes so fast Yuzu startles. “Kinda. Trying to sleep but I can’t.”

It’s not exactly what Yuzu meant, but he knows Shoma doesn’t dwell on things very much. He might have put the short behind him already. Yuzu hasn’t, his mind still twisting around the hug and the way it felt to skate freely, almost as if there were no expectations, what a relief it was to do well regardless, well enough to set up a good start into the free tomorrow.

Yuzu yawns, and figures that if he can’t nap, and Shoma can’t nap, they might as well not-nap together. He slides out of bed and pours himself into his shoes. He doesn’t know where Shoma’s room is, so he has to text him.

Shoma replies with the number. A few minutes later, when Yuzu is almost there, another message arrives.

“Door’s open, just come in. I’m too lazy to get up.”

So Yuzu pushes the door open, and steps into the dim chaos that is Shoma’s hotel room. There’s clothes on every surface he can see, and food wrappers on every surface that isn’t covered in clothes.

“Wow,” he says. Shoma, from somewhere inside the blanket burrito on the bed, snorts.

“I know it’s awful, Keiji complains every time he comes in here.”

“Doesn’t Mihoko?” Yuzu asks, and hovers in the doorway. He doesn’t quite know how to enter without making the dirt worse and the clothes on the floor look mostly clean, so he toes out of his shoes again and leaves them outside.

“Nah,” Shoma says, “you wouldn’t think it but she’s not the tidiest herself.”

Yuzu steps gingerly onto a pair of jeans and a knit sweater. He’s never seen Shoma wear these things.

“What are you doing here?” Shoma says, between two yawns. Now that Yuzu’s eyes have adapted to the dim lighting, he can see Shoma’s face peeking out of the blankets when he moves. Shoma shifts, rolling over a little bit so Yuzu can sit on the side of the mattress.

“You couldn’t sleep, either. I thought we could not-sleep together.”

“Oh,” Shoma says. He yawns again, almost violently. It reminds Yuzu of how he yawned as a cat, full-bodied and intense. Shoma looks at him for a moment. Yuzu, out of sympathy, yawns as well.

He doesn’t expect Shoma to unwrap himself by rolling back and forth, or to laugh and lift a corner of the blanket. Yuzu stares blankly.

Shoma blushes, and shivers, which are completely opposite reactions that do not do together, but that are both utterly adorable. “It’s an invitation,” Shoma mumbles, and lets the blanket fall.

“Oh!”

Yuzu hadn’t realised. But he wants to join him. It might help, it definitely helped to sleep with someone, before. Maybe that’s why he’s so exhausted. Shoma lifts the corner of the blanket again, and Yuzu, awkwardly, lies down next to him.

He’s close enough to see, even in the dim darkness of the room, the single lashes against Shoma’s cheeks as he blinks, slowly. This is the closest Yuzu has been to a person since… well since he woke up next to Shoma. No, that’s not quite true. He hugs Brian and Tracy and Javi and Misha, he hangs all over his friends when they let him. This feels closer than that, maybe because it is lingering touch, the end not entirely foreseeable. Yuzu might get up in five minutes or five hours.

Shoma sighs, eyes blinking slower and slower. If he falls asleep, Yuzu might not leave at all. The bed is warm, the air slightly stale and stuffy, and Yuzu feels his muscles relaxing one by one. Shoma shifts, sighs again. If Yuzu turned his back to him, Shoma might reach out and wrap his arms around Yuzu’s middle, and they might tangle their legs and even just the idea awakens the sense memory of his dream, just two nights ago.

The comfort and the feel of skin against skin and heavy limbs resting against each other. Yuzu doesn’t know what hormones the body creates when people lay together like that, but it’s a good mix. He knows that skin contact is necessary to the health of the human body, he just hadn’t considered that it might come in this form. It seems reserved to hugs and handshakes, and, distantly, the idea of sex. Not the sleepy weight of a friend against his side.

Shoma, eyes shut and breath evening out, shuffles and shifts, and Yuzu shifts with him, careful not to touch too much. But it’s almost as if Shoma is seeking it out, leaning against him in a new spot every time Yuzu disentangles himself. Yuzu feels his brain go sluggish. He’s warm and comfortable and Shoma smells pleasant, like sleep and salt. Yuzu gives up, and leans into the touch after all, and it ends up a little different from the dream after all, but the mood is the same.  

He wakes up a few times when Shoma shifts or when Yuzu’s arm falls asleep under his waist. He’s not used to someone breathing against his cheek and Shoma’s hair tickles Yuzu’s neck and Shoma sighs in his sleep. It’s distractingly pleasant. It helps that Shoma is responsive, half-awake and blinking slowly, holding onto Yuzu when he can, leaning into his touch when he can’t. He’s pushy, too, pulling Yuzu closer, pressing against him demanding, grumbling when Yuzu wakes him up by shifting and making plaintive noises when cold air rushes under the blankets.

He doesn’t know what wakes him. Shoma’s weight on his chest, perhaps, or the hum of a phone vibrating a room over, or the velvety feeling of Shoma’s skin under his palm. Shoma is spread over his side, head pillowed on Yuzu’s shoulder, relaxed and unmoving. His shirt is rucked up under his armpits, Yuzu discovers, when he slides up to find somewhere less… naked and only finds Shoma’s shirt at his shoulders.

But when he stops and rests his hand there, Shoma moves, nuzzles closer into Yuzu’s side. It’s simple, dreamy, to run his fingertips over Shoma’s back with the slightest amount of pressure and see if that will wake him or calm him. It’s half-instinct, half pleasure, so he does it again and again, alternating between palm and fingertips, until Shoma mumbles something.

Yuzu freezes. Shoma, mumbling again, blinks slowly up at him. And then, rather than blushing and moving away, he turns until he’s belly up in Yuzu’s arms.

Shoma makes an encouraging, wondering noise, low in his throat, a sentence without words. He’s unembarrassed, warm and relaxed and open and Yuzu wants to be like that, too. He wants to keep this moment. Yuzu fits himself to Shoma’s back. Then he fits his palm high onto Shoma’s tummy. He stills, hesitates.

He can’t really see Shoma’s face like this, can barely decipher the outlines of his chin in the darkness, but he can feel him stiffen, a little, and that’s not what Yuzu wanted. He wants him relaxed, sleepy, he wants to enjoy this. He wants to touch, he’s just not quite sure how to do it. He spreads his fingers, experimentally, presses his fingertips into the soft skin of Shoma’s belly. Shoma moves into the touch like he’s been waiting for it.

It’s easy to curl around him, easier still to feel out the lines of his body in smooth, smile touches. He’s smaller, put together differently from Yuzu, who’s wiry muscle and pointy bird bones. Shoma is compact and square all over, but his edges are hidden well. Yuzu’s fingertips find his waist, and he chases the curve down to his hip, flattens his palm over the bone there and draws it over, to the center of his belly.

Shoma sighs, and tips his head back. His smile comes easier here than it usually does. He looks pleased and comfortable, tilting and stretching like a cat after a filling meal. His hair a mess when Yuzu runs his fingers over it, and there are lines imprinted on his face from the edges of Yuzu’s shirt. Yuzu runs another circle over his tummy, and Shoma rests back against him, going limp.

“Ok?” Yuzu asks, voice higher than he’d like. He sounds overwhelmed, tries to train his voice into something calm and confident.

But Shoma doesn’t notice. He hums, nods. “This is nice.” He tilts his head back again, and Yuzu can’t help but smile back at him this time. “More than nice.”

“It’s like you’re a kitten again,” Yuzu says, quietly. Shoma nods, arches his back and twists his shoulders, and it’s strange to see it happen and feel it too, against his body and under his hand as well, before Shoma comes back to rest, heavy against Yuzu’s side.

“Yeah... Sometimes...” he hesitates. Yuzu dances his fingers lightly over  Shoma’s arm, just to tease him. He’s avoided accidentally tickling Shoma, knows that he reacts to light touch by curling up and laughing, but it seems like a good idea now. Shoma, as expected, huffs and grabs Yuzu’s hand. Yuzu laughs, tries to pry himself from Shoma’s grasp but fails.

“What were you going to say?”

“Sometimes,” Shoma says, and lets go of Yuzu’s hand after all, “well. Not sometimes. Usually? I will turn into a shape that will provide me with what I need.”

“Oh?” Yuzu prompts. He can imagine why a cat, when Shoma is spread out on the bed, resting against him still, when they are skin to skin and just breathing. Yuzu feels more settled after this nap than he has in a while.

“I just wonder…” Shoma continues. He turns, rolls away from Yuzu and onto his stomach to lean up on his elbows. Yuzu can’t imagine the view of him Shoma gets like this: bottom up, his soft chin must look hilariously terrible. He misses the warmth of him, uncomfortable where the blanket is pulling at him under the strain of movement. A little vain voice in his head wants him to adjust but Shoma just leans his chin on Yuzu’s shoulder.

Yuzu’s hand has found its way to the middle of Shoma’s back, and Shoma echoes the gesture and places his hand high on Yuzu’s chest. He’s never this generous with touch. Usually, Yuzu reaches out and Shoma stays stock-still, bearing rather than welcoming it. He is melting into every touch now, and Yuzu melts right back. But...

“You do dislike PDA, right?”

“What’s that?” Shoma asks, ripped from his thoughts. He looks shy, suddenly, like he’s become aware of just how unusual the situation is for them. If someone had told Yuzu even three days ago that Shoma would invite him to nap in the same bed, he would have laughed.

“Uh... being touched with other people around?” Yuzu explains.

Shoma goes still at that. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.” he admits. “It’s not… I generally don’t...  do? Stuff like... that?”

“I know,” Yuzu tells him, “I don’t take it personally, I’m just surprised at _this_.”

Shoma moves, his chin digging into the flesh of Yuzu’s shoulder. Yuzu winces, and Shoma nuzzles closer, smoothing his cheek over the spot instead. It’s a nod, Yuzu realises, when Shoma hums agreeably.

“Is it the cat?” Yuzu probes. “Did you turn into a cat because you wanted… this?”

“Hmm,” Shoma murmurs, “I don’t know. It’s kind of… who knows what came first? I don’t usually dwell on it.”

“Ok.” He rubs a soothing circle on Shoma’s back. “I understand.”

Shoma hums, closes his eyes again.

“Tell me something,” Yuzu asks, after a long moment of silence that stretches like honey off a spoon. “If you could shift into any form, at all, by choice. What would it be?”

Shoma whines in the back of his throat, which makes Yuzu chuckle at him. “Don’t laugh, it’s hard.”

“Is it?” Yuzu teases.

Shoma stares at him, eyes glinting in the dim light. “What would you be?”

“Hm,” Yuzu says, “I’d like… I mean, ideally I’d turn into the healthiest version of myself?”

Shoma’s face crumples into a frown at that. “That’s not… how it works. I don’t - can’t - shift to fix myself. When I’m injured, and I become something else, the injury comes, too. It doesn’t disappear.” It spills out of him as if the thought had been clinging to the back of his mind for a while and only now has come free, voice raising as he talks. In the silence of the room, it’s startling.  

“Oh,” Yuzu whispers, “I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

Shoma’s face doesn’t smoothe out. He worries, concerned for Yuzu even as he’s helping.

“Apart from that,” Yuzu continues lightly. He drags his fingers over Shoma’s forehead and his eyebrows until he relaxes. “I think I’d like to be a bird.”

Shoma’s expression resolves, slowly, like he has trouble letting go of his worry. But he grins, in the end. “Let me guess: a swan?”

“No! Maybe… maybe a flamingo. They’re very good at one-legged things. And they’re pink.”

“They eat a lot of shrimp,” Shoma offers. Yuzu knew he knows a lot of weird random facts, but this is… out there, weird enough to make Yuzu laugh. “That’s why they’re pink. If they eat other stuff, they are just white.”

“Good to know,” Yuzu teases back. “Thank you so much for this fun fact.”

“It’s very cool!” Shoma insists. “You’d be a white flamingo!”

“Like you were a dark and orange cat?” When Shoma tilts his head in confusion, Yuzu’s eyes grow wide. “Wait, you don’t know what you looked like?”

In his haste to get at his phone, which is still in his trousers, Yuzu almost elbows Shoma in the ribs. He laughs it off, falls back onto the mattress. Even in the dim light, Yuzu can see that he’s flushed. He looks right, reclined and sprawling and joyful.

“Here,” Yuzu offers, and falls back next to Shoma once he has fumbled his phone out of his jeans with clumsy fingers. “Let me show you.”

“You took video?” Shoma exclaims with an embarrassed groan. “Oh no!”

“Shhh, you were adorable.”

It’s funny, to watch Shoma watch himself. He cringes whenever the cat does something funny, and Yuzu can see how much he’d like to facepalm. But with Yuzu by his side, Shoma chooses instead to lean his forehead against his shoulder. They’re by each other’s side on their bellies, so it takes some contortion for Shoma to hide his face and laugh helplessly, but he’s flexible.

“There’s photos, too,” Yuzu admits. He shows Shoma a few he’d taken when Shoma-cat was conked out and happily purring on his lap. He doesn’t mean to show him the selfie he took in the mirror to send to Javi, the one where Yuzu looks all too soft and vulnerable, holding Shoma against his chest. Or maybe he does. He’s not entire sure what to make of the tightness in his chest as he watches Shoma. Insecurity, maybe. Or something else.

The light of the phone colours Shoma’s face blueish white as he studies the picture. It throws his profile into sharp relief, and Yuzu knows Shoma is cute, that he is aesthetically pleasing to say the least, but he’s never thought of him as handsome, necessarily. It’s Shoma: Yuzu’s job is to take care of him, make him lighten up and laugh. He’s never thought about the dimple over Shoma’s upper lip as a perfect place to set a kiss.

He thinks about it now. Shoma looks soft and a little uncertain when he glances at Yuzu, eyes dark and wide. “Yuzu,” he starts, and swallows. He licks his lip, bites at a dry bit of skin. It shouldn’t draw Yuzu’s eyes to it, it shouldn’t draw him in at all. Yuzu finds himself nodding encouragingly.

“I know I asked before, but… why did you take me with you?” He doesn't have to elaborate. Yuzu understands.

“You were… alone. And scared.”

Shoma nods, swipes to the next picture on the phone. Yuzu watches him swipe slowly through the rest of the photos on Yuzu’s camera roll. There are many: Yuzu doesn’t have a lot of keepsakes, so he keeps every memory he wants to save on his phone. He wonders if Shoma realises what it means to him.

Shoma lingers over the strangest photos, almost randomly: a selfie with Misha, a photo of Javi at the café at the airport on their way to Pyeongchang, the picture Nobu sent of his family, all of them beaming except for the baby which drools. He looks at the photo Yuzu took of an old photograph of his mother when she was just a school girl, eyes flickering between her face and Yuzu’s, but he moves on without saying a word.

It’s more intimate than sleeping together, Yuzu realises, as Shoma thumbs through a bunch of podium selfies, pictures Yuzu took with other skaters, photos of flowers and landscapes and that squirrel at the park that Yuzu feeds every time he passes through. It’s more intimate than sex, he thinks, when Shoma hesitates over something else. It’s not a great photo: it’s slightly shaky, a shot of the TCC rink that is overlit and underexposed and that was Yuzu’s best attempt at being sneaky. It would be self-centered to take a photo of his plaque, his name up there with his heroes, so he tried to be subtle.

“It’s so empty,” Shoma whispers, and taps the far side of the screen to zoom into the photo. “Your name is up there a second time now, isn’t it?”

Yuzu remembers taking this photo, years ago now, hands shaking with excitement. He remembers arriving to practice as early as he could, waiting until the doors were opened to the rink, and rushing onto the ice on his own. He remembers looking up at that sign for the first time: there’s Yuna, and then there’s him. It felt like coming home.

He got caught, of course. He remembers hearing Brian chuckle at his slack mouthed awe from the side of the rink, and startling; he remembers Tracy rubbing his shoulder and telling him that it’s alright to gloat a little bit. That he deserves to rest on his laurels for a moment.

Back then Brian reminded him the plaque was there for a reason: as inspiration for the other kids, of course. But also as a sign of what could be achieved, each engraved name a dream made material. Everyone knew Yuzu wanted more, wanted to add his name to the list once more. Yuzu talked about it more than often enough. And Brian took Yuzu’s oversized ambition in stride, encouraging and supporting, but also prodding at bruises when Yuzu would have rather not acknowledged them.

“Yeah,” Yuzu murmurs, and then he smiles, “They put up the new plaques shortly after the competition. It’s Yuna, Gabby, Javi and me, now.”

Someone else might have missed it, but Shoma zeroes in on the importance of the statement with an accuracy that aches. “So you’ll have friends with you up there,” Shoma teases, “that must be nice.”

“It does get lonely at the top,” Yuzu jokes back. It falls somewhat flat. Shoma smiles, but it grows smaller, more serious as he thinks.

“It does,” he says, slowly, “doesn’t it.” He thumbs back, until he finds the mirror selfie.

He _is_ magic, Yuzu thinks. It’s not all shape-shifting and flowerhair, though. Shoma often seems like a blank slate, a brick of a boy, stoic and motionless, but he’s perceptive. He’s… attentive, but in a different way than Yuzu might consider himself to be. Yuzu notices something and acts immediately, rushing to the rescue. Shoma seems to acknowledge it before waiting, preferring to see if it can resolve by itself rather than interfering. He files information away to deal with later.

Later seems to be now.  

“Who did you send this to?” Shoma asks, after studying the photo for a while longer. He’s looking at Yuzu from under his eyelashes again, careful and subdued. Yuzu laughs, strangled. “You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t know.”

Shoma nods, and hands Yuzu’s phone back to him. “You’re right,” he says, and cuddles closer, until he’s plastered along Yuzu’s side. Yuzu sighs, but he melts into the embrace. “I do know you sent it to Javi. I also know you miss him a lot.”

Yuzu nods. If Shoma had been hiding his face in Yuzu’s shoulder out of embarrassment, Yuzu does it because he might cry if he looks at him. He might cry even if he doesn’t. Shoma runs soothing hands down the expanse of Yuzu’s back, and holds him.

“It’ll be alright. Change is confusing and scary and sometimes you are stuck for a while, but you’ll always end up where you need to be.”

Yuzu laughs, wetly. “Talking from experience, huh.”

Shoma giggles, brushes his cheek against Yuzu’s. “Maybe? It doesn’t matter. If it’s true it’s true.” He doesn’t seem to mind that Yuzu is kind of destroying the moment by getting teary eyed. He just holds on, breathing evenly, until Yuzu feels like he might not cry after all. Yuzu doesn’t pull away even then. He feels tired, exhausted just by talking and feeling with such intensity, and Shoma is solid and warm. 

Yuzu remembers his strange dreams only when he’s almost asleep, in that dozing state where the mind is open and he feels like he’s floating. He wonders if he’ll dream of the cat again, or the squirrel, or whatever it was. Maybe Shoma is enough to ward the spirit off. Shoma is magic, he can do it. Shoma, next to him, mumbles something. 

“Hmm?” Yuzu whispers. 

“It’s probably your subconscious,” Shoma mumbles, a little clearer. 

Yuzu blinks, mind clearing as if Shoma had sprayed him with ice, and sits up. “What?” 

Shoma groans, twists until he’s lying on his back with his eyes screwed shut. “Your trainer told Mihoko about your worries,” he says, and yes. There is the curl of a smile hidden on his face as he blinks up at Yuzu. “And she told me. But I don’t think you have to worry about prophetic dreams,” Shoma says, grin growing further. He looks much less sleepy now. “You’re magic, but you’re not that kind of magic. You’re more of the… impossible deeds variety.” 

“Oh,” Yuzu whispers. It’s kind of a letdown wrapped in a compliment. He’s slightly disappointed. Shoma snorts, laughs at Yuzu’s stubborn lower lip sticking out. 

“Sometimes dreams are just dreams, Yuzu,” Shoma says and pulls at Yuzu’s arm. “Maybe you just needed a cuddle.” 

Yuzu frowns at him. Then he shrugs, and lies down on top of him, enjoys Shoma’s exasperated groan as Yuzu makes himself comfortable. “You slept on me, before,” he laughs, when Shoma struggles to throw him off. “Now it’s my turn to sleep on you.” 

“Ugh,” Shoma says, and wiggles. He can’t get away though. Yuzu laughs at him, and Shoma groans louder and someone bangs against the wall. “Shh,” Yuzu tells him, and laughs harder, because Shoma went wide-eyed and clutches at Yuzu at the interruption. 

When the banging stops, Shoma leaves his hands where they are, spread out on Yuzu’s back. Yuzu rests his forehead against Shoma’s shoulder.  He feels strangely happy. Shoma pokes him in the side, but he also pets Yuzu’s back, smooth, circular motions, like he’s copying the way Yuzu had touched him before. 

“Do you think it’s silly,” Yuzu asks, after a while, when he feels heavy and sleepy again, “that I wanted to believe my dreams were magical. I thought I’d helped you turn back.” 

“Hmm,” Shoma hums. “I think you did, though. Even if it wasn’t in the way you thought you did.” 

“What do you mean?” Yuzu wants to lift his head and look at him, but Shoma chooses this moment to lift his hand to the back of Yuzu’s neck, fingers wrapping around the short strands of hair there. Yuzu leans into the touch instead, enjoys the feeling of Shoma scratching his neck and his lungs expanding and how their bodies fit together snugly like this. 

“You helped by taking care of me,” Shoma says, slowly. It sounds like more than that, though. Yuzu doesn’t want to have to dig, wants Shoma to offer something. Truth, maybe. Yuzu screws his eyes up, buries his head into Shoma’s shoulder. He wishes. Shoma just runs his fingers through Yuzu’s hair. 

“You always take care of me,” Shoma continues, when he realises that Yuzu won’t reply. “Even when I was a cat, you took care of me. You didn’t worry about me, did you? When I wasn’t human.” 

“No,” Yuzu says. It’s not easy to admit: he should have been worried, he should have been panicked. Instead, he’d been peaceful. Happy, even. Distracted.  

“I think you knew that I was around you,” Shoma says. “I think you saw me, even though you didn’t realise it. It was impossible for you to realise it.” 

Yuzu nods. There isn’t much to do but nod: Shoma has thought about this, and he’s right. 

Shoma pushes at Yuzu’s shoulder, and Yuzu has to stop hiding. He doesn’t know what the expression on his face says, but Shoma looks similarly confused and open and hopeful. 

“I like this,” Shoma says, almost too quiet to hear. “Cat or not, I like you. I don’t want you to be alone.” 

Yuzu is glad for the dim light, because he feels like every ounce of blood in his body is rushing to his cheeks, and he wants to badly to just close the gap between them and let it be that. 

“I like you, too,” he says, voice just as quiet. It’s a fragile sentence, suspended in the air between them. “I like this.”

Shoma smiles. “I know,” he says and it feels like he’s caught Yuzu and all of his insecurities. There is a beat of silence. Then Yuzu nods, settles down next to Shoma again. There’s something to a confession like that, the open-ended possibilities of a sentence like that. Shoma pulls Yuzu closer. Yuzu meets him halfway. 

He thinks about it until he falls asleep. He doesn’t dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this cuddle-fest, open-ended as it is <3 Thank you for reading and leaving comments along the way. The end of this fic also marks the beginning of a hiatus for me. I'll try to answer all of your comments though.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  Thank you to a friend who lurks in the shadows for this skillful edit, because it made me laugh and served as motivation to start this.


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